Why You Should Never Redirect All 404 Errors To Home

This is a common occurrence that I see when performing an SEO audit on client websites. They end up installing some random "SEO" plugin off the WordPress repository that redirects all 404 errors to their homepage. They do this because they have been told 404 errors are bad and instead of properly fixing them they go the dangerous route. Let's talk about why you should never redirect all 404 errors to your homepage.

Dispelling The Myth

The first thing we need to discuss is whether 404 errors are inherently bad or not and common to popular belief they aren't always a bad thing. A 404 error simply says to the user or bot that this content no longer exists. This can be something simple such as you removed the page because it was no longer relevant. It could also be something more sinister for instance, sometimes your pages may 404 due to an error in rewrite rules. The fix in WordPress is to simply go to settings -> permalinks and hit save this adds the rewrite rules to your htaccess file.

A 404 error is only necessarily bad in the following situations.

• The content does infact exist and an error is occurring preventing users from accessing it.
• The content was moved to a different URL and a redirect was not added.
• The content was added, but there is a very similar piece of content the user could instead be redirected to.

A good 404 page acts as a means of saying this content doesn't exist but guides the user to try and find either similar content or search for said content. For instance, our 404 page looks like the following.

What this does is it says hey this content doesn't exist and it gives them 2 avenues of progression. The user can either A simply go to the homepage or B search for content and see if something similar exists. A well designed 404 page should act more like a guide rather than be a simple dead-end for the user.

Bad Redirects Are Confusing

Redirecting content for the sake of redirecting them is confusing for your users. If you run an ecommerce site for instance and the user clicks a link in Google Search only to be redirected to your homepage the user gets no feedback as to what happens. This causes the user to do one of two things.

The user will either A. try to find said product again only to be more confused as they can't find it. Or B. the user simply bounces off the page because they think it's broken or not useful.

If you're an eCommerce site it might be better to either mark a discontinued product as discontinued or send them to a 404 page explaining this product is no longer being sold and suggesting alternative products to look at. Either way the user gets proper feedback letting them know the product they were looking for is no longer able to be purchased and it gives them avenues to further explore your site.

Bad Redirects Don't Provide Any Real SEO Benefit

The issue with a 301 redirect is it's meant to communicate to search engine bots that the content that was at the given URL no longer exists and instead is now this new URL. If I were to simply redirect pages that I deleted to the homepage it's quite likely these will be read as a soft 404. A soft 404 is simply a page that is returning a 200 status code (instead of a 404). Google decides whether to treat the page as a 404 if the redirect is to an irrelevant page, or if the content on the page is very thin.