“404 – page not found” – who hasn’t seen this when browsing the internet? Landing on a 404 error page is one of the most annoying things you can experience on a website. 404 errors can negatively affect your website in many ways – they frustrate the visitors and send negative signals to search engine bots. It’s therefore important to quickly identify and deal with 404 errors.
The first place to look is in your Google Analytics reports and Google Search Console to see what’s already turning up. Then, after taking care of the easy-to-find errors, you can use crawling tools to find more in-depth 404 errors, like broken images on your site.
In this knowledgebase article, we’re going to walk you through how to find out where your 404 errors are coming from.
1 Using Google Search Console
The easiest way to find out your 404 errors is to use Google Search Console. To do so, navigate to the Pages section and then click on the Not indexed tab as shown below:
Here you can find the status Not found (404) or Soft 404 (user-friendly 404 pages). Clicking on a status will open a list with the affected URLs. You can then check the affected URLs and fix the 404 errors.
2 Using Google Analytics
Log in to your Google Analytics account, and navigate to Behaviour > Site Content > Content Drilldown as shown below:
Next, search for 404.html (or the 404 error page you’ve set on your website) to see all the 404 errors that have turned up on your website. The format of the links in this report helps you figure out what page the visitor was trying to go to and where they came from. This ultimately helps you to discover and fix 404 errors easily.
Once you’ve found the 404 errors, it’s time to fix them. If you know what caused the 404, it’s best to fix the link that caused it. If not, you can always choose Rank Math, as fixing 404 errors is extremely simple with Rank Math’s 404 Monitor. You can take many actions to fix the errors, and we’ve created a dedicated tutorial for it. We recommend you check it out to understand how to solve 404 errors.
If you still have any questions about finding out where your 404 errors are coming from – you’re always more than welcome to contact our dedicated support team, and we’re available 24/7, 365 days a year…