Why 404 Errors Are Killing Your SEO (And How I Fixed Mine)

I already have 85 published posts so far, yet only a few of them are performing well on Google and getting traffic. Some people say that content is king, but nothing will happen if you don’t do any marketing.

I’ve been writing for over four years and doing SEO for three, and now it’s time to focus on the marketing side of my content and optimize all of it.

My current plan is to optimize each post for SEO, share it on social media, and monitor the technical health of my website.

What I Found During My Blog Audit?

I decided to do an audit and found 30 URLs returning a 404 Not Found error. This means the server cannot locate the webpage or specific link a user is trying to visit.

How 404 Errors Affect SEO?

This is bad for SEO because it affects user experience, increases bounce rate, causes a loss of backlink opportunities, and wastes crawl budget.

• Loss of backlink opportunity or link juice. When another website uses your-link-a as an external link and it leads to a 404 page, that backlink is lost and doesn’t count as a valid resource.
• Wasted crawl budget. Search engines have a crawl budget, which means they allocate a limited number of crawls to your website within a specific time frame. If they crawl a 404 page, it wastes that budget and signals poor site maintenance. It may also delay indexing healthy pages.

As of now, my website has a Domain Authority of 5, which is low considering its age. My PageSpeed Insights Performance score is 69.

I’ve also noticed a decline in clicks and impressions, with only 737 total clicks and 78.9k total impressions in the past three months.

That’s not great. So I’ve decided to prioritize SEO and marketing over publishing thin content.

I exported the 404 error data from Google Search Console into Excel and started monitoring and fixing them one by one. I’ve learned that 404 errors appear when links no longer exist—they might have been deleted, moved, or mistyped.

How to Solve 404 Not Found Issues

To fix these issues, you can:

• 301 Redirect (Moved Permanently): Redirect the broken URL to another page. For example, if link-a causes a 404, and you know it was a mistake or permlink issue, you can redirect it to link-b. This avoids losing users and helps your SEO since Google crawlers won’t hit a dead end. Crawlers dislike 404 pages, and you lose crawl budget when they encounter them.
• 410 Gone: This status tells crawlers the page has been permanently deleted and will not be available again. However, using this is risky for SEO because it nullifies any backlinks pointing to that page. Use this only when you are 100% certain that the page is gone for good.

I’ve done several 301 redirects, which is the most recommended SEO practice for solving 404 issues. This method is especially useful for fixing mistakenly written URLs and unpublished posts that are related to existing ones. I plan to redirect and combine related posts to avoid confusing the crawlers.

So far, I’ve:

• Fixed 11 URLs
• Marked 16 URLs as “In Progress”
• Left 2 URLs as unresolved

Some of the URLs marked as “In Progress” will be merged into a single post, while others will need to be rewritten because they’re outdated.

There’s still a lot I need to improve on my site—things I should’ve focused on earlier but didn’t due to being busy with school and life.

Next year will be the final judgment: should I keep this blog or not? That’s why I’ve decided to give it my full effort and attention now.

I’m still creating a checklist of what to focus on and improve, but so far, I’m enjoying the progress.

To help with marketing and to stay current with trends, I might use TikTok to document my SEO journey. I’ve wasted a lot of time before, mostly due to being busy and sometimes lazy, but that’s changing now.