Should you fix every 404 in Google Search Console? No. A site with some 404s is a normal, healthy site, and the report is closer to a recycle bin you glance through than a to-do list you clear. I’ve been saying that for years, and I got a second vote from Eva Mermingi, a freelance technical SEO and co-founder of Athens SEO, when I interviewed her for Unscripted SEO. I barely got the question out before she agreed.
Every technical audit has a 404 section. Most of it is noise
You know the audit I mean. Crawl the site, export Search Console, and there’s a page of 404s at the top of the findings with a red severity label. 404 here, 404 there, 404 this, 404 that. It looks like work, it’s easy to count, and clearing it feels like progress.
Here’s what Eva said when I brought up my pet peeve:
“But I find it quite healthy for a website to have like an X amount of 404s. It’s quite healthy. It’s normal.”
She admitted she used to want them all gone, back when she wanted everything to work perfectly. Five years at UK agencies on sites approaching a million URLs changed that. Her two conditions are worth keeping: it isn’t an important page, and the number isn’t high. If either is false, it’s a real finding.
Treat the 404 report like a recycle bin
That’s how I use it. You look through the bin for anything valuable that got thrown out by mistake: a page with links pointing at it, a product URL that still gets traffic, something a developer deleted during a launch. You pull those out and redirect them. Everything else stays in the bin.
What you shouldn’t do is let the bin set the priority list. A crawler like OpenSEO’s site audit will happily hand you every broken URL on the site, and that’s useful, but the count of broken URLs isn’t the thing you’re being paid to move. Eva puts duplication, internal links that hit redirects, orphan pages and indexation ahead of it. I agree with her order.
The same logic applies to Core Web Vitals
Eva loves Core Web Vitals work, and she still puts it after the basics. When she checks the top 10 results for a keyword, six to eight of them fail. “Core Web Vitals won’t save you, it won’t rank if you don’t have the other basics when it comes to SEO.”
I call it a tiebreaker. If you’re not on page one, tuning speed is like measuring the spacing between the tools on your workbench before you’ve started building anything. The exception is the site that takes six to twelve seconds to load and isn’t getting large sections indexed. That’s not a tiebreaker anymore, that’s the hole in the boat.
That metaphor came up on the episode too. On big enterprise sites, most technical SEO problems are barnacles on the hull: drag, inefficiency, things that slow you down. Occasionally there’s an actual hole, and everyone’s so busy putting up more sails nobody notices it’s sinking. A 404 report full of old blog URLs is barnacles. Your best category page returning a 404 is a hole.
How you deliver the finding matters as much as the finding
Here’s the part of Eva’s approach I’d steal first. She’s direct, and early in her career she assumed clients just wanted the truth, delivered straight. Then she learned the audit only works if they act on it.
“And it’s quite funny because you think that tech audits is all about data, but no, it’s actually how you deliver the data as well.”
I have the same tension. Part of you wants to whack the client on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper for the missing canonicals. (Oddly, most clients I’ve audited ask for more punishment, not less.) But a 40-page list of 404s, sorted by count, tells the client everything is broken and nothing is urgent. If you’ve ever read up on client reporting best practices, the advice is the same for monthly reports: lead with the thing that changes a decision.
Eva’s other rule keeps the audit honest: “I’m not going to create issues when they’re not.” If the site is technically healthy, you say so and point at content or links instead. That’s how you sell technical SEO without getting stuck on the hook for promising it’ll triple the traffic.
So what do you do with your 404 report this week?
- Sort it by inbound links and traffic, not by count.
- Redirect the handful that had value. Leave the rest.
- Check for 404s in the main navigation and footer, where one fix clears the error from every page.
- Then go back to duplication, internal redirects and indexation, which is where Eva starts and where the impact is.
If you want to know whether your pages are even indexed before you worry about any of this, start with checking indexation before you blame the algorithm. And if you want Eva’s whole audit order, from bespoke schema to the custom GPT she built for it, listen to the full episode.
Leave the bin alone. Fix the hole in the boat.