Greenlight’s Ultimate Guide to….the 404 status code & SEO

Every page you visit on the Internet will return something called a 'status code', a code consisting of three numbers that communicate to the requester the status of their request for a particular page. A 404 is ultimately an error message by default and is a very frequent and recognisable message experienced by every single internet user. 404s are not inherently bad, they exist for a very good reason. Their ambiguous nature however means that search engines (and your users, and your rankings) will often benefit from some direction on what action to take when they come across them. Without this direction and left unmanaged, 404 errors are problematic. Here are the SEO impacts and the possible solutions.