Online marketing
fromPractical Ecommerce
2 weeks agoYes, 404 Status Codes Hurt SEO
404 status codes are not direct ranking signals but can indirectly harm SEO through poor usability and loss of link equity.
404: URL doesn't get indexed; it's an invalid URL, so this is fine. Just to be clear: 404s/410s are not a negative quality signal. It's how the web is supposed to work. 410: It's a 404, essentially. Homepage redirect: URL doesn't get indexed. Maybe it stays soft-404 & gets crawled (not great, not terrible). Category redirect: URL doesn't get indexed. Potentially a short-term support for the category page, but still confusing to users.