In a Google Office Hours podcast, Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about 404 page not found errors that coincided with a drop in rankings.
Bad external 404 errors
There are probably many reasons for 404 errors created by bots. One reason for these error responses could be that they come from automated scanners that look for files or folders that are common for specific vulnerable plugins or themes.
Checking the IP address and user agent of the bot that is causing the 404 server error responses can also give clues if those 404 responses are coming from automated scanning bots. If the IP address says it’s from a web host, or a Russian or Chinese IP address, it’s probably a hacker. If the user agent is an outdated version of Chrome or Firefox, it’s probably also a hacker’s bot. This is just one of many reasons.
Google answers the question
The person who asked the question correlated a drop in rankings with server responses of 404 pages not found.
This is the question that was asked:
“False 404 URLs coming to my website from an external source, could this be related to the ranking drop? What can I do to fix this?”
Google’s Gary Illyes responded:
“The false 404s that Googlebot may have tracked cannot reasonably be attributed to a drop in ranking. It’s normal to have any number of 404s on a site and you don’t need to fix them, although if you see in your analytics software that a larger number of real users are also passing through these 404 URLs, I would personally try to convert them somehow by showing them relevant content.”
No ranking drops and 404 pages found
Gary said that 404s are normal and unlikely to cause a drop in search rankings. It’s true that 404 errors are common. This is usually fine and most of the time nothing needs to be fixed.
404 that are generated by real users
There are other cases where 404s are created by real people who follow a link from somewhere and get a page not found response. This is easy to diagnose by checking to see if the URL that site visitors are trying to reach looks very similar to a real URL. This is an indication that someone has misspelled a URL and the way to fix this is to create a redirect from the misspelled URL to the correct one.
About the downgrade
One thing Gary didn’t mention but is worth mentioning is that there may be a small chance that a bot found a vulnerability and the 404s were caused by a scanner looking for vulnerabilities before finding one.
One way to check this is to use phpMyAdmin, a server application, to view your database tables in the users section and see if there is an unrecognized user.
Another way, if the site is hosted on WordPress, is to use a security plugin to scan the site for a vulnerable theme or plugin.
Jetpack Protect is a free vulnerability scanner created by the developers of Automattic. It won’t fix a vulnerability, but it will alert a user if it finds vulnerabilities related to the plugin or theme. The paid premium version offers more protection.
Other reliable WordPress security plugins are juices i Wordfenceboth do different things and are available in free and premium versions.
But if that’s not the case, the drops in rankings are pure coincidence and the real reasons lie elsewhere.
Listen to the Q&A at the 12:27 minute mark of the Office Hours podcast:
Featured image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero
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