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Fix 404 Errors with Google Webmaster Tools
Website errors, like the 404 page not found errors, are bad for SEO. If you have added your website to Google Webmaster Tools, you will find a section list possible crawl errors. Google bot crawls your websites or blogs regularly. Any crawl or access errors detected by Google will show up there.
It is very useful feature for webmasters to find and fix the website errors. In this article, we will talk about how to fix 404 erros with Google webmaster tools. We will focus on fixing 404 errors for WordPress sites. If you have built your website with other tools like Joomla, Drupal, you should also expect silimlar tools and settings to fix the 404 errors.
Log on your webmaster tools panel with your Google account, then go to the Crawl >> Crawl Errors section, you will find a list of all page errors. See below screenshot.
To fix a 404 error is easy. First click on a URL displayed, you will get a pop up dialogue with two sub-tabs: Error Details and Linked from. Go to the Linked from tab, you will find what pages or sources linked to a not existing page on your website. If the web page did existing before and you made changes of its URL, it will cause this issue. In such case, you can simply redirect the old URL to the new one. For those unknown URLs, you may consider to direct them to similar page or the home page. If your business partners, clients, suppliers or link partners referred a lot of visitors to an false URL, you can also contact them to point to the correct URL.
Fixing 404 Errors for WordPress
A lot of WordPress websites I know of are hosted on PHP + Linux servers and most of these WordPress hosting service providers are offering cPanel to their clients. To fix 404 errors for your WordPress which is managed through cPanel, you can simply create 301 redirects in cPanel. If you have a lot of pages not found, you can install a redirection plugin for WordPress. If you have technicial background, try to set up redirection for WordPress through the .htaccess file. It is also very easy, takes just several minutes.
