A 404 error means a page that used to exist no longer does — or never did. When 404s appear in your sitemap, you're telling search engines to crawl pages that return nothing, which wastes crawl budget and erodes trust. If enough dead pages accumulate, Google may reduce how often it crawls your site.
Picture an online store that just finished a catalog cleanup — 340 discontinued product pages removed in one afternoon. Nobody updated the category pages, the old email campaigns, or the internal search results that still link to them. Six weeks later, the sitemap health report shows 340 URLs returning 404, crawl frequency on the rest of the site has quietly dropped, and nobody connects the two. That gap between "we deleted some pages" and "Google is now crawling our whole site less often" is exactly what this guide is for.
The good news is 404s are fixable, and fixing them is one of the highest-leverage technical SEO tasks you can do. This guide walks through how to find them, how to prioritise which to fix first, and the three ways to resolve each one. If you're not sure whether robots.txt or your sitemap is the right place to manage this, read how the two files divide responsibility first.
How 404s End Up in Your Sitemap
Sitemaps are usually generated from the links a crawler discovers on your site. If a link points to a URL that returns 404, the crawler still logs it. This happens more than you'd think, for a few reasons:
- Content was deleted — a blog post, product page, or landing page was removed but links to it still exist in navigation, footers, or other content.
- URLs were changed — a site migration, CMS switch, or URL structure change left old URLs intact in navigation while the pages moved to new addresses.
- Typos in links — a mistyped href in a nav link or internal article link points to a page that doesn't exist.
- Third-party links — external sites linking to old URLs that have since changed.
Step 1 — Find All the 404s
Run a full crawl of your site. After the crawl completes, open the health report and filter by status code to show only 4xx errors. This gives you a list of every URL your crawler visited that returned a 404 (or 403, 410, etc.).
Export or screenshot this list — you'll need it for the next steps. Sort by URL path so that similar pages (e.g. /products/... or /blog/...) appear together — this makes it easier to spot patterns.
Step 2 — Decide How to Handle Each 404
Every 404 falls into one of three categories, and each category has a different fix.
Option A — Restore the page
If the page was deleted by mistake, or if it was a page that still has value (old blog posts, product pages for items you still sell), restore it. This is the cleanest fix — you get the page back, any backlinks pointing to it pass full value, and the 404 disappears from your report.
Option B — Redirect to the best matching page
If the page is gone for good but there's a relevant replacement, set up a 301 (permanent) redirect from the dead URL to the most relevant live page. For example:
- A deleted product page →
/products(the category page) - A renamed blog post →
/blog/new-post-slug - An old landing page → the most relevant current service page
A 301 passes link equity (ranking signals) from the old URL to the new one, which protects any SEO value the original page had. Don't redirect to the homepage unless there's genuinely no better option — search engines treat "redirect everything to the homepage" as a soft 404.
Option C — Remove the broken link
If the page is gone and there's no suitable replacement, the right fix is to find where the link to that dead page lives on your site and remove it. Check your navigation menus, footer links, internal blog posts, and any curated link lists. Once nothing on your site points to the dead URL, the crawler won't discover it, and it drops out of your sitemap on the next crawl.
Step 3 — Prioritise What to Fix First
If you have dozens or hundreds of 404s, don't try to fix them all at once. Work in this order:
- Pages with inbound backlinks. If external sites are linking to a dead page, fixing the 404 with a 301 redirect recovers that link equity. Check Google Search Console under Links to find which of your 404s have backlinks.
- Pages linked from navigation or footers. These are crawled on every visit and hurt your crawl budget the most.
- High-traffic pages from your analytics history. If a page used to drive significant organic traffic, restoring or redirecting it can recover those rankings.
- Everything else — work through the remainder systematically, batching pages of the same type together.
Step 4 — Verify and Re-crawl
After making changes, trigger a new crawl. The health report will update to reflect the current state of your site. A URL that previously returned 404 should now show 200 (if restored) or 301 (if redirected). If it still shows 404, the redirect wasn't applied correctly — double-check your server config or CMS redirect settings.
Once your health score improves, resubmit your sitemap to Google Search Console so Googlebot picks up the changes promptly.
Preventing Future 404s
The best fix is prevention. A few habits that keep 404s from building up:
- Before deleting or renaming any page, check whether anything links to it and either update those links or set up a redirect.
- Turn on scheduled auto-refresh (weekly, daily, or monthly depending on how often your site changes) so a fresh health report lands before broken links have time to compound — catching a handful of new 404s is a five-minute fix; catching 340 of them six weeks later is a project.
- When migrating platforms or restructuring URLs, create a redirect map before going live.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do 404 errors directly hurt my search rankings?
A single 404 on its own doesn't penalise your site — 404s are a normal, expected part of the web. The risk is indirect: a sitemap with a high proportion of dead URLs signals poor site maintenance, which can reduce the crawl budget Google allocates to you and slow down how quickly it discovers and re-indexes your genuinely good pages.
How many 404s in a sitemap is too many?
There's no official threshold, but as a practical rule: if 404s make up more than a small fraction of your total submitted URLs, treat it as urgent. A sitemap is supposed to be a curated list of pages worth crawling — the moment it starts doubling as a graveyard of dead links, it stops doing its job.
Should I remove 404 pages in Google Search Console manually?
Search Console's Removals tool only hides a URL from search results temporarily — it doesn't fix the underlying issue. Removing the link from your sitemap (and from anywhere it's linked on your site) is the permanent fix; the URL will naturally drop out of Google's index once it's re-crawled and confirmed gone.