
But if you have individual errors because of broken URLs, that will inhibit Google’s ability to properly crawl your site and have a negative SEO effect in that way.Īdditionally, if a issue is causing sitewide 404 errors, Google won’t be able to crawl any of your site’s content.

But it might have a negative impact depending on the reason for why the error is happening.įor example, if a visitor just mistypes a URL and sees a 404 error – there won’t be a negative impact on SEO. Kinsta 404 page Error 404 Not Found Impact on SEOĮrror 404 Not Found doesn’t have any inherent negative impact on SEO. Always include search functionality on your 404 page. We include a search box and some of our recent blog posts to help visitors find what they might have been looking for. Funny 404 page exampleīelow is an example of our own 404 page at Kinsta. For that reason, you might not actually see the error message at all because many sites will use funny or creative 404 pages instead. Some WordPress themes also include custom 404 pages by default. The Error 404 Not Found message is also unique in that many sites will actually create a custom page to address the error, rather showing one of the messages above.
#404 not found error wordpress code
But if something goes wrong, your web browser will usually display a message with the HTTP status code to indicate the exact problem. Most of the time, the request works perfectly and you never actually see the HTTP status code ( unless you go looking). The HTTP header includes HTTP status codes to explain “what happened” with the request. Whenever you, or one of your visitors, visit your website, your browser sends a request to the web server and receives back data including something called an HTTP header. A 404 status code does not indicate whether this lack of representation is temporary or permanent the 410 (Gone) status code is preferred over 404 if the origin server knows, presumably through some configurable means, that the condition is likely to be permanent. The 404 (Not Found) status code indicates that the origin server did not find a current representation for the target resource or is not willing to disclose that one exists.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) defines the error 404 Not Found as:
