It seems everyone has plenty of questions about 404 errors lately, and Gary Illyes from Google has been answering many of them on Twitter. The latest followup question was asking whether 404s have any impact on Panda 4.2.
And not surprisingly, the answer is no, there’s no impact on Panda.
@Photogkris nope @JohnMu
— Gary Illyes (@methode) August 11, 2015
The discussions began when Illyes commented that 404 error pages do not cause a Google penalty. He followed up later stating that Google ignores links to 404 pages, and aside from some edge cases, regular 404s and soft 404s have links ignored too.
John Mueller also detailed the differences and nuances between a 404 error page and a 410 page earlier this year too.
There have been many questions about the latest Panda refresh, particularly with its extremely slow rollout. But 404s don’t have any Panda impact.
