google indexed pages that now 404
search results send people to urls that no longer exist. visitors hit a 404, leave, and your rankings drop. usually a one-hour redirect job.
google indexes urls forever. if you redesigned, moved a blog, changed categories, or migrated platforms, the old urls are still in google's index. people search, click, hit a 404, leave. you lose the visitor and you lose ranking over time as google de-prioritises pages that consistently 404.
what this looks like to a visitor
- google search console reports lots of '404 not found' errors
- you redesigned the site and old urls broke
- you moved a blog or store category and forgot to redirect
- visitors land on your site and see a 'page not found' screen
what a public browser check can see
we hit the homepage and confirm it returns http 200. if the homepage itself is broken, that is the first emergency.
we read the homepage links and try each one. any that return 404 are surfaced — usually old navigation that lost its target during the redesign.
we read /robots.txt to see whether you accidentally disallowed crawl paths that contain the broken urls. that would be a second issue stacked on top.
shopify, squarespace, and wordpress each have characteristic 404 patterns when categories change. we look for those traces in your html.
we do not log into your site. we do not scrape customer data. we open your public homepage in a real browser session and report what we see. no security claims unless we can prove them from the public surface.
the deeper picture
the four common patterns: (1) the redesign forgot redirects. the new site has different slugs and there is no redirect map. fix: export the list of indexed urls from google search console, build a redirect map, deploy via the platform's redirect feature. (2) blog moved hosts. you migrated from wix to wordpress (or vice versa) and post slugs changed. fix: same as above but the redirect map is bigger. (3) shopify or woocommerce categories renamed. category urls baked into the structure changed. fix: shopify supports url redirects in admin → online store → navigation → url redirects. (4) actual deletions. content really is gone. fix: return a clean 404 (not a soft 404 that returns 200 with a 'not found' page) and let google de-index over a few weeks.
fix it yourself
in google search console, export the list of 404 urls under 'pages → not indexed → not found (404)'. open each one and decide: redirect to its new home if there is one, return a real 404 if the content is genuinely gone. for the redirects: wordpress has plugins like redirection; squarespace and wix have native url-redirect settings; shopify has 'navigation → url redirects'.
run the audit on YOUR site — check for "google indexed pages that now 404"
we open your homepage in a real headless browser and report what we see. no login, no plugin install.
public browser check · no signup · result on the next page
or pay us once.
you can do this yourself if you are comfortable with redirect rules and willing to spend a couple of hours. if the redirect map is more than a handful of urls or the platform redirect tooling is awkward, the $99 contact form repair tier covers it: we generate the redirect map, deploy it, verify with google search console, hand back the report. done in two days.
frequently asked
yes — a 301 (permanent) redirect passes nearly all link equity. a 302 (temporary) does not. always use 301 for redesigns and moves.
no — that is a 'soft 404' and google treats it as worse than a normal 404. redirect each url to the closest equivalent. only redirect to homepage when nothing is close.
high-value backlinks should be redirected to the most relevant new page, not the homepage. the public check cannot see backlinks; the deep audit ($49) can, using free tools like ahrefs site audit.
two to six weeks. you can speed this up by submitting the redirect map in google search console's url inspection tool, page by page for the most important ones.
other fix guides
- why is my wordpress site slow— what an external browser sees when your wordpress homepage takes too long to render — and the four things that are almost always behind it.
- shopify checkout feels broken — how to find out why— a public browser check of your shopify storefront can surface the visible reasons people abandon. here is what we look for.
- contact form looks fine but i'm not getting emails— this is the most common silent failure mode of small-business websites. four reasons it usually is — and how a public check can rule out the wrong ones.
- wix site not showing on google — what a public check can tell you— your wix site exists, but it does not appear in google search results. four reasons that explain almost every case.
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