404 Not Found

The resource does not exist at this URL. The most familiar error — correct to return for genuinely missing pages, and important to get right for SEO.

What it means

404 Not Found means the server has no representation for the URL and will not say whether the absence is temporary or permanent. It is the right status for typos, deleted content whose permanence is unknown, and unmatched routes.

HTTP RESPONSE

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

SEO impact

Real 404, not soft 404

A missing page must return the 404 status — not a 200 with a 'not found' message (soft 404), and not a blanket 301 to the homepage. Soft 404s waste crawl budget and can get junk indexed. If content is gone for good, prefer 410.

Why it matters

Correct 404s let crawlers drop dead URLs instead of indexing empty pages.
A helpful 404 page (search, navigation) recovers users who hit a broken link.

Common mistakes

Returning 200 for missing pages (soft 404).
Redirecting all 404s to the homepage, which creates soft-404 signals and confuses users.
Serving a 404 for a page that actually exists due to a routing bug, deindexing real content.

How WebInspect checks this

WebInspect reports the final status and flags status/content mismatches such as soft 404s.
It distinguishes real 404s from pages that redirect elsewhere in the redirect chain.