What is 404 error and how to fix it

Surfing the internet is already part of our day to day. We do it normally, anytime, anywhere and from a variety of devices. It is almost natural, saving all distances. However, for you to read this post, it is necessary that all a series of technologies work in the proper way. If not, then failures occur, with Error 404 being one of the most common. Today we reveal what it is, what consequences it has and how to solve this error that, surely, you have encountered on more than one occasion.

Index of contents

Meaning of Error 404

Something as everyday as making a query on Google, reading this post or surfing the Internet in general, requires a triple connection between the server where the content we want to visit is hosted, a client and the web browser. Since you are reading this article in Professional Review , we can deduce that this connection has worked without any problem. That is, everything is fine if we see the information we wanted to access in our browser. However, throughout this connection process, different failures can occur that have been cataloged with a series of codes, with Error 404 being the most common failure.

Error 404 is a status code sent from the server to the browser to inform us that the requested page does not exist or could not be found on the server.

It follows that the connection to the server DOES work correctly, while it has returned the error we are talking about. Therefore, we should not associate Error 404 with a communication problem, in this case, with the web server.

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As you may have already imagined, Error 404 has not been named by chance or randomly, but its three figures have a certain individual meaning that, taken together, allows us to know what it is about.

In this sense, 4 refers to the fact that the web page or resource that we were looking for no longer exists or, at least, could not be found; 0 refers to a syntax error; and, finally, 4 refers to the specific problem experienced and that is different from other problems, hence there is also Error 402, Error 401, Error 403, etc.

Bad consequences

If you have a blog or a website that returns Error 404 to users, you should know that the consequences are not positive, so you should fix it as soon as possible.

Firstly, users will be able to stop trusting your website, that is, you could suffer a loss of credibility since when they want to access important information for them, it is impossible for them.

But in addition, this also negatively affects your web positioning; Google does not like this type of failure at all and will make you fall in the search results, which translates into loss of visibility, credibility, clicks, relevance, income…

How to detect Error 404

Consequently, it is clear that Error 404 is a fault that must be solved immediately so that it does not appear to our users when they browse through our website or when they want to access any of our content.

Thus, to detect this error, we can use free tools such as:

• W3C Link Checker: just indicate the URL of our website to analyze it and inform us of which links we should correct Google Search Console: we will know which links the search engine has detected as erroneous and, once solved, we can mark them as corrected to that penalizes our positioning. DeadLink Checker: tool similar to W3C Link Checker

How to fix Error 404

The solution of Error 404 is not complex, and is related to the reason that caused it. In this sense, the most common is that it is because the web page already indexed in search engines has been removed. This is a slight failure to which we have two solutions. The ideal is to replace the content of that page with other content and do a redirect, but we can also wait for Google (and other search engines) to go through the page again, realize that it no longer exists, and stop showing it.

There are occasions when Error 404 is shown when pressing an external link to a website that has already been removed. The solution is simple: replace that link with another one or, if it is not possible, simply delete it.

Another cause of this frequent error is a poorly written link. If it is an internal link, just re-edit the link and correct it, but if it is an external website that tries to link to ours, then we must add the misspelled URL to the configuration of our WordPress, as well as make a 301 redirect to the correct site.

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As in the previous case, if you have renamed a page and forgot to redirect to the new one, just do that 301 redirect that we have already mentioned.

And now that you already know much more about the causes that give rise to Error 404, how to detect it and also how to solve it in a simple and effective way, remember us and do not forget to notify us in the event that you come across any of them in Professional Review .