Using Google Search Console Tools To Clean Up Your (404) Act

This article is an entire rewrite of its original 2012 version. When Google launched the new Search Console (thus killing the legacy 404 report), it rendered the old version of this post useless.

The bad news is that the new URL inspector doesn’t work the same as the legacy report. In the previous report, you could look at 404 URLs and see what pages are linking to them internally and externally. The external URLs could be great websites! So, the previous article explained how to quickly find good links that are severed because of your 404’s.

The rewrite of the article (the one you are reading now) will also help you identify the link opportunities, but thanks, Google. You did take the ease out of it. Well, let’s stop dwelling on the past and get to the topic.

The Coverage Report

The Coverage report (on the left side under “index”) is multi-purpose. If you click the Error block (in red below), you’ll get a list of errors that Google has encountered. In this case, there are redirect errors that lead to 404s, but you will likely see some other similar errors as well.

Click the error you want to dig into. You’ll get a list:

Be prepared to work through each URL. If you have many, grab a beer.

After clicking the link you want to review, click:

You will then see a new individual URL report:

The area I highlighted is an example of the page Google followed to find the error. This is relatively unimpressive compared to the legacy Search Console report that listed many URLs. In the legacy tool, you might see a link from a good website that you’d want to reconnect (with a redirect). That would help you build a priority list.

However, now you’ll have to rely on a third-party tool like Majestic, Ahrefs, Moz, or wherever you get your backlink data. At Greenlane, we use Ahrefs:

In this report, I see a few internal links that will be restored by adequately redirecting my erroneous URL. But I also see a link from a Blogspot post. It is a lower quality, nofollowed, unauthorized republish of my post. With this information, I would prioritize this one lower on my list of redirects.

Repeat these steps for each URL you need to review.

Conclusion

Yes, this is a manual process. It may be sped up through APIs in the future (at this time, I don’t believe the Ahrefs API can pull actual URLs like those displayed in the tool). Try splitting it up with several team members. It’s an excellent task for entry-level or interns as well.

I try to do this exercise monthly on large sites (especially news and e-commerce) and once a quarter on small sites. If you have hundreds or thousands of 404s, you’ll quickly see why I suggest a prioritization process. It’s a bit like pulling weeds in your yard. You’ll have that one day when you get the bulk of the weeds. Then you need to do it once in a while for maintenance. But if you want a healthy website (and lawn), it’s a task you shouldn’t avoid.