4XX Gets Traffic

Element Code: OR-011

What a "4XX gets traffic" issue is

The 4XX family is HTTP status codes in the 400 to 499 range, which mean the client request failed. The ones you meet in the wild are 404 (not found), 410 (gone, deliberately removed), 401 and 403 (auth or forbidden), and 400 (bad request). When a report says a 4XX page is getting traffic, it means a URL that returns one of these error codes is still receiving visits, from users clicking links, from other sites linking in, from search results that have not caught up, or from your own internal links pointing at a dead target.

A 404 with zero traffic is housekeeping. A 404 with steady traffic is money and link equity leaking out of a hole in the floor. Those are the ones worth your afternoon.

Why it matters

• You lose visitors mid-intent. Someone wanted your product, your article, your contact page. They got an error and, unless your 404 page is unusually helpful, they leave.
• Link equity evaporates. If external sites link to a URL that now 404s, the ranking value those links carried is largely wasted. Redirect the URL and you recapture it.
• Crawl budget gets burned. On large sites, Googlebot repeatedly hitting dead URLs is wasted crawling that could go to pages you care about.
• It signals neglect. A pile of trafficked 404s usually means a migration went wrong, a plugin broke slugs, or internal links were never updated.

Decision path: what to do with each 4XX URL

How to find them

• GA4. Filter your page report by page title or path for your 404 template (for example, title contains "Page not found"). Sort by views to see which dead URLs actually get traffic. Add the referrer dimension to learn where the clicks come from.
• Search Console. The Pages report under Indexing lists "Not found (404)" URLs Google has tried to crawl. The Links report shows which of your dead pages still have external links worth recapturing.
• Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. Crawl the site to find internal links pointing at 4XX targets. The "Response Codes" tab plus "Inlinks" tells you exactly which pages contain the broken link so you can fix the source.
• Server logs. The ground truth. Grep the access log for 404 and 410 responses to see real request volume, including bot hits you will never catch in analytics.

Which fix for which situation

Step by step fix

1. List the trafficked 4XX URLs. Pull from GA4 and Search Console, sort by traffic, and grab referrers and external links for each.
2. Decide the intent per URL. Use the decision path above. Do not blanket-redirect everything to the homepage; a soft 404 to the homepage is worse than a clean 404.
3. Restore what should exist. If a real page was deleted or its slug broke, bring it back at the original URL and confirm it returns 200.
4. Redirect deliberate replacements. Add 301 redirects to the closest genuinely relevant page. One-to-one, not one-to-homepage.
5. Retire the truly dead. Return 410 for content that is gone with no replacement, and make sure your 404 template offers search and popular links.
6. Fix the source links. Update internal links pointing at dead URLs. For high-value external links, ask the linking site to update, or at minimum keep a redirect in place.
7. Validate. Recrawl with Screaming Frog, use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, and watch the 404 count trend down over the next few weeks.

What "good" looks like

Trafficked 404s trend toward zero. Removed pages either redirect one-to-one to a relevant replacement or return a clean 410. External links to old URLs are recaptured via 301. Your internal links point only at live pages, so Screaming Frog shows no internal 4XX. And your 404 page, for the stragglers that will always exist, actually helps: search box, top links, no dead end. You will never hit a perfect zero, but you should never see a 404 quietly eating a thousand visits a month either.

FAQ