Should I fix “Not found (404)” in Search Console?

Updated October 21, 2026 · Check Before Publish

Usually not. “Not found (404)” means Google requested a URL and got a 404, which Google says is “not necessarily a problem”. Its advice is to fix only the 404s you link to yourself or list in a sitemap. If a page moved, redirect it; if it is gone, a real 404 or 410 is the right answer.

The short version

• Google's definition: “This page returned a 404 error when requested. Google discovered this URL without any explicit request or sitemap.” It might have found it as a link, “or possibly the page existed before and was deleted”.
• “404 responses are not necessarily a problem, if the page has been removed without any replacement.” For a moved page, “use a 301 redirect to the new location”.
• Google's 404 help page says “404 errors won't impact your site's search performance” and that “404s don't harm your site's indexing or ranking”. A 2011 post on Google's blog says the same.
• Google treats 410 the same: “Currently Google treats 410s (Gone) the same as 404s (Not found).”
• Googlebot keeps trying: “Google continues to crawl all known URLs even after they return 4XX errors for a while”, and “there is no way to tell Googlebot to permanently forget a URL, although it will crawl it less and less often.”

Fix it, redirect it or leave it

Don't send every dead URL to the home page. Google says redirecting many old URLs to one irrelevant destination “might be treated as a soft 404 error”. See soft 404.

Make sure a 404 is a real 404

A friendly “not found” page must still answer with the 404 status. Google: “Custom 404 pages are created solely for users. Since these pages are useless from a search engine's perspective, make sure the server returns a 404 HTTP status code to prevent having the pages indexed.” Paste a URL below to see which status it really returns.

What we tested

On 2026-10-19 we ran the live Website Pre-Publish Checker on three addresses.

Two things follow. The checker is built for pages you are about to publish, so it rates every 404 as “Fix before publishing”; for a URL you removed on purpose, a 404 is the answer you want. And it judges the status code, not the wording: a page that says “not found” while answering 200 passes, which is the soft 404 case. This site had that bug until September 2026; the soft 404 guide tells the story.

Where is the 404 linked from?

In Search Console, inspect the URL and read its Discovery section. Google's help says the referring page “might directly link to this URL, or it might be a grandparent or great-grandparent of a page that links to this URL”, and that the value can be absent even though a referrer exists.

How long until it goes away

Google gives no time for an indexed URL that starts returning 404 to leave the index: it says only that such URLs “are removed from the index” and that Google will “stop using the URL over time”. The one figure it gives is for the report: the Page indexing report shows only URLs that returned 404 in the past month, and the 404 help page says a deleted page “should stop” showing after about a month.

What this can't tell you

It cannot say whether a 404 is harming anything: Google's pages say it is not. It also cannot see where a URL is linked from. And two of the Google pages we read are old: the 404 help page uses the former “Crawl Errors” wording and the blog post is from 2011, so weigh them with the current Page indexing help, which says the same.

Related: Soft 404, Page with redirect and Sitemap could not be read.