Key Takeaways
- Broken external links pointing to 404 pages waste valuable link authority and frustrate users.
- 404 errors can cost you hundreds of monthly visitors and potential conversions.
- Google passes zero link authority to pages returning a 404 “not found” status.
- Most 404 problems happen when you move or delete pages without setting up redirects.
- Use Google Analytics custom reports to identify which external links are broken.
Let’s you and I play a little game together: pull out your wallet, grab a twenty-dollar bill, rip it up into tiny pieces, and toss them into the air, letting them fall all around you like confetti.
Now get out another and do it again.
Do it one more time – Feels great ripping up cash, doesn’t it?
Okay, I’m onto you – you didn’t play along because ripping up cash is just silly or even crazy, am I right?
Well, then, why are you okay with your website ripping you off? – What if your site is doing the equivalent of tearing up $20.00 bills? All. Day. Long.
All night too because your website doesn’t sleep.
Don’t believe me? Read on…In this article, I’ll uncover two ways you’re unintentionally wasting your hard-won SEO efforts, and I’ll show you precisely what to do about it.
The Undeniable Impatience of You & Me
You love sitting there patiently waiting for websites to load, don’t you? (Don’t get ahead of me thinking this is all about site speed and page load times – it’s not.)
Admit it – you and I are both impatient on the interwebz – but wait, what about when you click on a link expecting to arrive at some page you hope to see, but you get something like this:
“Please check the link you followed and try again.”
Yeah, no. I don’t think so.
If you’re reading an article on Forbes’ website and the article links to something that makes you click, only to get a “page not found” message, you go berserk, don’t you? You scream obscenities at the top of your lungs while you toss your laptop or mobile device out the nearest window, just like I do, am I right?
Maybe I’m exaggerating to make my point, but seriously – I’m not going to click on a link from Forbes, and then get a not found error page, and then start rooting around that site looking for the content I was promised… unless I’m really, really, really interested.
Most of the time, I’m not that interested; I’m just going to shake my head and move on because I’m busy or lazy and just don’t have the time for playing “Where’s Waldo” with some piece of content I was hoping to get post-click. And I’d say it’s a safe bet that you move on, too.
That’s the first way you’re wasting your SEO efforts: you’re creating great SEO content, earning links, and people are clicking through to your site, but they’re reaching an error page.
And it’s irritating to reach error pages. For the most part, people will abandon that task and move on. You lose money. Or leads. Hear that sound? – It’s the sound of ripping up cash.
The Second Way You’re Wasting Your SEO Efforts
If you know anything at all about SEO, then you know that links to your website are important.
And not crucial in the way we just talked about, where someone clicks a link to arrive at your site, links are also important because Google uses them as ranking signals for their Organic (non-paid) search results listings.
If you’re reading this, I have to assume you already know that Google and other search engines have widely & successfully used links in the past to surface search results that satisfy users. If not, feel free to check out some info on Wikipedia here, Search Engine Land here, and Moz here. And yes, due to past abuse and ongoing algorithm changes, links are not the end-all be-all they used to be for organic rankings, but they’re still important organic ranking signals because they pass Link Authority to your site.
So those links pointing to error pages we already talked about that annoy people? – Those links do not pass any Link Authority because they’re pointing at a page returning an HTTP “not found” status. It’s as if the pages don’t exist (because, well, they don’t), so there’s no reason for Google to pass PageRank / Link Authority to those pages.
Let’s recap what we know so far:
- Broken links annoy people
- Broken links do not pass Link Authority
And those, my friend, are the two ways you’re wasting your SEO efforts because you didn’t know you had external links pointing at pages on your site that no longer exist.
Oh, and how and why does that happen? In most cases, it’s because you made changes to your site – moved pages to a different section or otherwise changed the URL structure and path of certain pages or sections of pages. Or maybe somebody simply deleted a page or pages for whatever reason. There are several reasons why websites end up with 404 “Not Found” errors for pages that used to exist.
How Bad Can the 404 “Not Found” Problem Be?
I’m glad you asked. This is where things get fun.
Take a look at this screenshot showing referral traffic (people clicking links on other websites to arrive at this client’s website) but arriving at one of those annoying non-Link-Authority-passing 404 error pages:
And that’s just the top 10, but wow, the visitors hitting 404 pages here add up to more than 1,000 in just one month alone.
Ouch. See what I mean about wasting your SEO efforts? If this is your B2B SaaS or Tech site, can you see how you’re losing leads and conversions?
Let’s look at another example:
Look at those red arrows pointing at the referrers. Visitors are clicking on links on web pages, including those on Quora, Gmail (email marketing gone horribly wrong), Forbes, and Verizon Wireless—ouch! Oh, the humanity! Hundreds and hundreds of visitors click links on those sites, only to arrive at an annoying 404 error page. And of course, the wasted Link Authority from those high-quality sites—are you getting the picture now?
The sharp SEOs out there might call me out and say it’s the page’s Link Authority that matters more than the strength of the referring domain (hey, I’ll take a link from Forbes or Quora or any of these sites any day!) so let’s look at the actual Link Authority of the pages linking to the 404 pages:
All in all, I’d want to recapture that lost Link Authority. All of it. And I’d want to stop annoying people arriving at my site (who do you think they’re going to blame for reaching my website’s error page? Yep, my site, not the referring site).
That annoying feeling will transfer to your site, eroding trust. Not good, not good at all.
404 errors draining your website's potential?
How Do We Fix the 404 “Not Found” Problem?
The first step is to identify and verify that you have a problem. If you’re lucky, you won’t actually have a problem (yes, that’s possible), or your problem might be minor. You won’t know until you check and confirm for yourself.
If you have Google Analytics running, create a custom report. I’ll show you how. However, first, you’ll need to determine the Title Tag of your 404 Not Found page. An easy way to do that is to open your favorite web browser and navigate to a page on your site that you’re sure does not exist.
Example: http://www.mysite.com/djfalksdjflasjdflkjlasjdflk (replace mysite.com with whatever your domain is)
You should now be looking at your 404 page.
Note: If you have configured your server to redirect to your home page or return a 200 found status (a “soft 404”), you have a different problem and now have more work to do. Pages that do not exist should return a proper 404 Not Found HTTP status (there’s fodder for a future blog post; let’s set that aside for now).
At your 404 page, press and hold down the CTRL button on your keyboard and then press “U” to view the HTML source code of that page. Now, hold down the CTRL button and press “F” (for find) and type <title.
You will see something like this:
Copy the text between <title> and </title> to a notepad or similar, as you will need it in a couple of minutes.
Armed with your 404 page Title Tag, open Google Analytics (GA4) and use the “Explorer” tool, and configure it – use the screenshot below as your guide – and remember that Title Tag text you copied?-use that in the “Filter” section for Page Title.
You’ll see the bad news (or hopefully for you, no bad news) – you should now see a report populated like this:
Gosh, 246 visitors per month hitting 404 “not found” error page… Ah, I love the sound of ripped cash in the morning!
Reading the report table from left to right, you have:
- Landing page: The broken 404 page on your website that someone landed on after clicking a link on an external website
- Page title: Be sure to put your 404 page title into the “page title” filter section – in this column, you’ll see and verify it’s your broken page 404 Title Tag
- Page referrer: The external-to-your-website page that someone was on, clicked, and landed on the dreaded 404 page on your site
With this report configured, you can now fix your wasted SEO efforts. Here’s what you can do now:
- Visit each page under “page referrer”. Look at the page and/or in the HTML for the link pointing to your landing page. In most cases, you’ll find that, sure enough, there’s a link on the referring site pointing to a page on your site returning a 404 error. In this step, you can verify what you’re seeing in your Google Analytics report.
- You can also try visiting each of the pages noted under “landing page” – this is also a verification step; you need to check that the URL indeed returns a 404 Not Found HTTP status.
- If you want to get fancy or just like being expedient, you can export the custom Explorer report from Google Analytics and run your landing page URLs in a crawler like Screaming Frog; you can also run a separate crawl for all of the full referrer URLs using a custom setting to verify that yoursite.com exists in the HTML. How you want to verify all this stuff is up to you.
After your verification efforts are complete, you now have choices about how to fix the problems you found:
- If the page being linked to has been deleted, you can restore or rebuild the page that no longer exists.
- If the page being linked to has been moved (with a changed URL), you can set a 301 permanent redirect from the old URL to the current URL.
- You can contact the referring websites and ask them to change the link (that’s a lot of work that might not pay off, but it is a choice you have available to you).
- If the referring site created a link and they mistyped or misspelled the destination URL, you can do any of the above, but a 301 permanent redirect will likely be your fastest and easiest solution.
What Considerations Should You Keep in Mind?
Note that in most cases, doing a 301 is likely going to be your most expedient solution because it’s faster than creating a new page or restoring a deleted page, a ship-ton faster’n’ easier than contacting webmasters. Plus, you’re in control of setting the 301 on your timetable. Or, in some cases, your IT department’s timetable.
Sure, the 301 redirect is likely not going to pass full Link Authority, but that’s an acceptable tradeoff for fixing all these problems and recapturing the wasted external Link Authority. Plus, all those people clicking on those external links will arrive at the correct and intended page faster, meaning you’ll recapture those lost leads, sales, or other desired actions more quickly than otherwise.
Do put some care into the destination of the 301 redirects – if someone clicks on an external link expecting to land on a specific piece of information, then you should provide that information to them. Resist the temptation to simply redirect all external broken links to your home page, as that may frustrate people just as much as the 404 Not Found error page.
Give people what they expect to find after clicking. Don’t make them think or work – keep in mind how impatient we all are on the Web. Seriously, give people the information you promised before clicking, don’t try to be slick or lazy about that step.
Boost Your SEO Efforts with the Help of Upgrow
Now you have a foolproof plan to uncover and fix the two ways you’re destroying your SEO efforts. Now you can recapture that extremely important external Link Authority you were previously wasting. And, you’re no longer annoying people who are clicking external links, only to arrive at a “page not found” error page on your site. Now your website can stop burning leads and ripping up $20 bills all day long, and you can sleep better at night. Or maybe ask for a raise.
Need professional help with your technical SEO efforts? Reach out to Upgrow for a consultation and quick action steps you can take today!
FAQs
How do I find 404 errors on my website?
Use Google Analytics to create a custom Explorer report filtered by your 404 page title. Navigate to a non-existent page on your site to find your 404 title tag, then use that in GA4’s filter section. This will show you which external links are pointing to broken pages and how much traffic you’re losing.
What's the best way to fix broken external links?
Set up 301 permanent redirects from the old broken URLs to relevant existing pages. This is faster than rebuilding deleted pages or contacting other websites to change their links. Make sure the redirect destination provides the content users expect to find after clicking the original link.
Do 404 errors really hurt my SEO rankings?
Yes, 404 errors waste link authority from external websites. When high-quality sites link to your broken pages, Google passes zero PageRank or link authority to those non-existent pages. You’re essentially throwing away valuable SEO signals that could help your rankings.
How much traffic can 404 errors cost me?
The impact varies by website, but the article shows real examples of over 1,000 monthly visitors hitting 404 pages from external links. Each broken link represents lost leads, sales, and conversions. High-authority sites, such as Forbes or Quora, linking to your 404 pages can result in significant traffic and revenue loss.
