Should you be concerned if you get a report from Google’s Search Console indicating some pages on your website are not being indexed? Will those pages directly affect your search ranking?
The answer to if 404 not indexed pages will directly effect your search ranking is NO, it does NOT. Do they need to be fixed? That depends on why they aren’t being indexed.
To view the specific URLs on your website that are causing 404 errors in Google’s Search Console (GSC) and understand why they are not indexed, follow these steps:
- Access Google Search Console:
- Log in to your Google Search Console account.
- Navigate to the Page Indexing Report:
- Locate the 404 Errors:
- Scroll down to the section labeled Not found (404) in the “Why pages aren’t indexed” table. This section shows the number of URLs returning a 404 error.
- Click on the Not found (404) row to expand it. This displays a list of up to 1,000 URLs that Googlebot tried to crawl but found missing. The list includes the last crawl date for each URL.
- Inspect Individual URLs:
- Click on any URL in the list to open the URL Inspection tool. This provides details about the specific URL, including:
- Export the List of 404 URLs:
- Analyze the URLs:
- Review the exported list to identify patterns, such as:
- URLs that were deleted or renamed (common after site migrations or URL structure changes).
- Typos in internal links or sitemaps.
- External links pointing to non-existent pages (e.g., from spam or outdated backlinks).
- Pages impacted by SEO spam or hacks, which may have created and then removed spam pages.
- Review the exported list to identify patterns, such as:
- Additional Tools for Insight:
Notes:
- GSC limits the list to 1,000 URLs, so it may not show all 404s if you have more. Fixing the listed errors and requesting re-crawls can help reveal additional ones.
- Not all 404s need fixing (e.g., external spam links to non-existent pages can be ignored). Focus on 404s from internal links or sitemaps.
It’s been my experience that at least for WordPress sites, most SEO plugins like Yoast, RankMath and AIOSEO do an excellent job of managing sitemaps. It’s worth noting that since WordPress 5.5, XML sitemaps have been built into the core, so you may not need a plugin solely for basic sitemap functionality. However, these plugins enhance sitemap management with advanced customization, analytics integration, and additional SEO tools.
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