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Removing HTTP 404 Errors

Updated over a year ago

📘 This article explains how to use Botify reports to locate and address pages that return HTTP 404 errors on your website.

Overview

Removing broken links on your website usually starts with removing HTTP 404 - Not Found errors. Read why removing errors is important and why it is one of the first corrective actions to take when optimizing a website. To remove HTTP 404 errors, you need to identify 200 status code pages that have links pointing to pages that serve a 404 status code and in which pages these links are located:

Removing 404 errors includes the following steps:

Create a Report of HTTP 404 Errors

To find the pages that returned 404 errors:

  1. Navigate to the SiteCrawler > HTTP Codes report.

  2. Click on the 404 section of the HTTP Status Codes Distribution chart or the 404 URLs link in the Insights table:

    usecase_remove404_1.png


    A URL Explorer report shows all pages that returned an HTTP 404 status code in the selected crawl.
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    usecase_remove404_2.png

Either export the list of error pages and where they are linked from or proceed to identify priorities.

Identifying Priorities

There are two approaches to defining priorities:

Prioritize Based on the Type of Page

You may want to prioritize resolving 404 errors on your most strategic pages first.

Important pages returning errors may include:

  • Key pages on your website, such as top navigation pages, core content (e.g., articles, product pages), and paid traffic landing pages). This is bad for search engines and for your user experience.

  • Pages that are very close to the home page since they receive a significant amount of internal PageRank. You may want to filter your report to identify pages that are no deeper than three clicks from the home page.

  • Canonical pages (to which duplicate or near-duplicate pages point to as their main version).

Less important pages may include:

  • Pages with noindex tags.

  • User-generated content that is not central to your website.

  • Pages with a very small number of internal links pointing to them.

Use the URL Explorer filters and your segmentation to explore error pages to find which types of pages account for the bulk of the error pages. When you have the filtered report with your preferred columns, export the report to correct these high-priority error pages. After doing this first export, you can inverse the filters to export the rest as a lower priority.

Prioritize Based on the Volume of Pages

Alternatively, create a report based on the number of pages (Page B in the diagram below) that contain links to error pages.

This approach is best if your priorities are to:

  • Improve user experience: Page B is a popular page where the user is more likely to click on an error link. Start updating links in pages that are most visited or have a high number of page views.

  • Address the greatest number of errors quickly: To update more links in the shortest amount of time, start with pages where there are high amounts of links to correct.

To find the links to 404 pages:

  1. Navigate to the SiteCrawler > Outlinks report.

  2. In the Internal Follow Outlinks Broken Links Destination chart, click the "HTTP 4XX" section:
    ​

    usecase_remove404_3.png


    A URL Explorer report lists the pages that link to 404 error pages and the number of links in each.

  3. Add a filter to see only destination pages that have a 404 HTTP status code.

  4. Optionally add filters to show only pages based on URLs in a specific segment and the number of error links (e.g., more than one).​
    ​

    usecase_remove404_4.png

    ​

  5. Add a column for the destination of each of these internal links to see a line for each page and the destination link that serves a 404 error.

Now you can export this prioritized list of pages to correct.

Refine and Export the Report

With the list of error pages to correct, you only need to find where they are linked from:

  1. Add the following columns in the URL Explorer: HTTP Code and Source - Full URL. Including the Source - Full URL column creates an individual record for each redirecting page and each instance of a link to that page. Your resulting export may have many more lines than just the number of 404 pages. In the example below, only one 404 page was identified, but it is linked to nine different pages on the site.
    ​

    usecase_remove404_6.png

  2. Review the report:

    • The URL in the first column is the page that returns HTTP 404;

    • This page is linked from the URL in the third column.

  3. Click the Export as CSV link. Use the resulting file to update every instance of a link to the URL in column A with a new 200 status code URL, or remove the link.

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