| Alert Properties | Alert Description |
|---|---|
| Alert Name | Internal page not found |
| Code | P20 |
| Description | Unable to access URLs found on meta tags of the Web Pages |
| Level | Error |
If requests to a server for fetching a web page are not fulfilled owing to absence of the page, it will return a 404 error response, called “Error 404”.
404 errors won’t impact your site’s search performance, and you can safely ignore them if you’re certain that the URLs should not exist on your site. It’s important to make sure that these and other invalid URLs return a proper 404 HTTP response code, and that they are not blocked by the site’s robots.txt file.
In case of a missing internal page, indexed by the search engine, make sure it does not have 404 errors.
In theory, 404s have some impact on rankings but not for the whole site. If a page returns a 404 error code, it means that the page doesn’t exist, so Google and other search engines will not index it. Just make sure your pages exist, if you want them to rank. having thousands and thousands of 404 pages can impact your overall website.
Actual 404 pages do not hurt SEO directly, but links that contain the URLs to these pages can wreak some damage.
Learn more about 404 errors here.
Learn about Soft 404 errors here.