4xx pages: what it is and how to fix it
What it is
Pages returning a not-found or forbidden status code.
Why it matters to a client
Search engines drop these pages from results, and anyone arriving from an old link, a social post or a printed flyer hits a dead end.
How to find it
Run an AuditOpti free audit, or crawl the site with any crawler and filter the results by status code. In Google Search Console, the Pages report under Indexing lists the same problems from Google's side.
How to fix it
For pages that moved, add a redirect to the closest equivalent. For pages that are genuinely gone, make sure nothing on the site still links to them.
- 1In the SEO plugin (Yoast, Rank Math or SEOPress), open the page's SEO panel and correct the setting described above.
- 2If the problem repeats across a post type, change it once in the plugin's template settings rather than page by page.
- 3Clear any caching plugin afterwards, then re-check the live page in a private window.
How AuditOpti prioritizes it
AuditOpti scores this as high severity by default, then multiplies it by how many pages are affected — one page is not the same problem as a hundred. After that, the AI re-ranks it against everything else on the site by likely business impact, so a high-severity problem on a service page can outrank a critical one on a page nobody visits.
Check a site for this
Run a free audit and we'll tell you whether this issue is present — along with everything else worth fixing.