For years, SEO experts have warned about having “bad links,” or 404 errors, claiming that they’ll cause increased bounce rates, indexing problems, and poor user experience. But in a resurfaced post from Google’s John Mueller, the company is now saying otherwise. “404s are fine,” Mueller wrote on LinkedIn in August 2025. “Having pages on a site that return 404 or 410 is perfectly fine with regards to SEO (and, yes, even optimizations for AI systems),” Mueller reiterated, “even if it’s hundreds of millions of pages.”
What Else Did Mueller’s Update Say?
- Returning 404 (or 410: they’re essentially the same for crawlers) is the technically correct way to deal with requests to URLs that don’t exist.
- You can use a use robots.txt, or robots meta tag if you don’t want a crawler to use your site’s content.
What Causes a 404 Error?
- Your website has a deleted page.
- You changed the URL link name in the backend, and didn’t update it on your website.
- Your website has corrupted files.
- Your website has DNS errors.
How to Determine if Your Website Has a 404 Error?
- Google Search Console: You can log into your website’s Google Search Console account and click on the “Pages” report. Once there, you can view individual URLs that could not be crawled by Google. (These URLs will be indicated with a “Not Found (404” status.)
- Bing Webmaster Tools: You’ll need to Reports, Crawl Information, Crawl Issues, before you’ll receive a list of “404 Pages Not Found.”
- Other Tools: You can also use alternative tools (Screaming Frog, Ahrefs) to monitor your website’s 404 errors.
How to Fix a 404 Error?
- You can set up a 301 redirect, which will get rid of the error and send users to the correct page.
- If you use WordPress, you can reset your Permalinks settings, which manages your website’s URL structure.
- You can repair your website’s .htaccess file, which handles your website’s service configurations.
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