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How to Find and Fix 404 Errors on Your Site
Finding 404s is easy. The judgement is deciding which ones matter: a 404 on a URL nobody ever linked to is working as designed.
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Four sources, four different answers
Use more than one. Search Console tells you what Google noticed, a crawl tells you what your own site links to, and logs tell you what is genuinely being requested — including URLs from external links you never knew existed.
| Source | Finds | Blind spot |
|---|---|---|
| Search Console | 404s Google encountered | Only URLs Google knows about |
| A site crawl | Broken internal links | Nothing about external links |
| Server logs | Every 404 actually requested | Needs log access and filtering |
| Analytics | 404s real visitors hit | Only if the page is tracked |
Triage before fixing
Not every 404 is a defect, and treating them all as one is how sites end up with hundreds of pointless redirects. Sort them first.
- Linked internally — always fix, by correcting the link. This is a genuine bug in your own site.
- Linked externally from a real site — redirect to the closest equivalent page, so the link keeps its value.
- Previously indexed with traffic — redirect if there is a genuine equivalent; otherwise leave it 404.
- Random or malformed URLs — leave them. Bots probe for wp-login and similar constantly; that is what 404 is for.
- Deliberately deleted content — return 410 rather than 404 to state intent.
Finding them in practice
- 1Open Search Console, Pages, and read the "Not found (404)" group — then use the referring-page data to see where the links came from.
- 2Crawl the site and export every internal link resolving to 404; these are yours to fix at the source.
- 3Grep server logs for 404 responses and rank by frequency — the top of that list is where the real traffic loss is.
- 4Check analytics for pageviews on your 404 template, with the requested path recorded as a dimension.
- 5Compare against your sitemap: any URL listed there returning 404 is a contradiction to fix immediately.
# Most-requested missing URLs
awk '$9 == 404 {print $7}' access.log \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -50
# 404s that Googlebot received — these matter most
grep Googlebot access.log \
| awk '$9 == 404 {print $7}' \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -20
# Check a single URL's status
curl -sI https://example.com/some-path | head -n 1Fixing the cause rather than the symptom
A redirect fixes one URL. Fixing the template that generated the broken link fixes every URL it will ever produce. When several 404s share a pattern — a category that was renamed, a trailing slash that was dropped — the pattern is the bug. Work through broken internal links for the link-level repair, and keep the redirect chain short as described in redirect chains .
How DomainLens contributes
DomainLens checks the links on the pages it audits and reports those that do not resolve, alongside the status code of the page itself — so broken internal links surface in the same pass as the rest of the audit. For the page visitors land on see custom 404 pages , and to trace where a URL ends up use the redirect checker .
- How many 404s are too many?
- There is no threshold. Google expects 404s and does not penalise them. What matters is whether the URLs returning 404 should exist — one broken link to an important page matters more than a thousand bot probes.
- Should I redirect all 404s?
- No. Redirect only where a genuine equivalent exists. Bulk redirects to unrelated pages become soft 404s and help nobody.
- Do 404s waste crawl budget?
- Marginally, and only at scale. On a large site with thousands of crawled 404s it is worth addressing; on a small site it is noise.
- How long should I keep a redirect for a deleted page?
- At least a year if the page had external links or traffic. After that, if nothing arrives, let it 404.