“Not found (404)” lists URLs that answered 404 when Google requested them. A missing page that answers 404 is the correct behaviour, and Google says plainly that 404s do not hurt the rest of your site. Most of these entries can be ignored.
They deserve attention when the missing URLs used to be real pages with traffic or links, or when your own site keeps linking to them.
Sort the list
Export the URLs and split them into four groups:
- Pages that moved. Old product, article or category URLs that now live elsewhere. → Redirect each one with a 301 to its new address.
- Pages that are gone with no replacement. → Leave the 404 (or use 410 to say it is gone for good).
- URLs that never existed. Typos in external links, bot-generated paths, old parameters. → Ignore, unless one gets real traffic; then redirect it.
- URLs your own site still links to. → Fix the links. This is the group that matters most.
To see where Google found a URL, open it in URL Inspection: the Referring page shows a page that links to it.
Fix internal broken links first
A link on your own site that leads to a 404 is a dead end for visitors and a wasted request for crawlers. Of the 24 sites SignalCrawler audited in September and October 2026, 10 had internal links pointing to pages that answer 4xx. They usually come from:
- menus and footers that were not updated after a page was renamed;
- hard-coded links in old articles;
- templates that build URLs from data that changed.
Update the links to the current URL. Fix the menu or template once, and every page is fixed.
Do not redirect everything to the homepage
Sending every missing URL to the homepage looks tidy but Google treats it as a soft 404, and visitors land somewhere unrelated. Redirect only to a page that replaces the old one; otherwise let it 404.
Make the 404 page useful
A good “not found” page answers with status 404 and gives visitors a way on: the main navigation, a search box and links to popular sections.
How to check that it worked
- A crawl of the site finds no internal links to 404 pages.
- Old URLs with redirects answer 301 to a page that answers 200.
- New 404s in Search Console are only URLs that never existed.
What SignalCrawler checks here
The audit reports internal links that point to 4xx pages, with the pages that contain them and whether the link is in the navigation, plus sitemaps that list URLs that do not answer 200, images that fail to load, and a “not found” page that gives visitors no way back. See also how to find broken links.