What to do when you see an increase in “404” Errors via Google Search Console

Googlebot identified a significant increase in the number of URLs on your website that return a 404 (not found) error. This can be a sign of an outage or misconfiguration, which would be a bad user experience. This will result in Google dropping those URLs from the search results. If these URLs don't exist at all, no action is necessary.

Recommended Actions:

1	Identify the URLs with errors Open the Crawl Errors report in your Search Console account to review the list of sample URLs.	Check Crawl Errors
2	Fix the issue If these URLs are meant to exist, review the server configuration to make sure that it returns 200 OK (you may need help from your server administrator or hoster for this). If these URLs are invalid or not meant to exist, review the source of the URLs. Fix any links to these URLs from within your website and consider contacting external sites linking to them. Consider redirecting the invalid URLs to the appropriate page on your site, if recognizable. URLs that return 404 Not Found do not affect the rest of your website's visibility in search.
3	Verify the fix Once you've fixed the URLs with errors, make sure that Googlebot can access and see your URLs properly, or that they return the correct error result code. Use Fetch as Google for this step.	Fetch as Google

Need more help?

•	See the Crawl Errors - 404 not found Help Center article.
•	Ask questions in our forum for more help