Do Google penalise you for having too many 404's?

[ArenaFlowers.com]

Hi There

I have been doing some work reducing the number of 404's displayed in the Crawl Errors found in Googles Webmaster Tools.

We had a lot of products that were no longer available so have now been removed to reduce the number of 404s that had been found.

However, there are a number of URLs that have been crawled that do not exist on our website and have been flagged in the list of Crawl Errors. I want to know if Google will penalise us for this, perhaps affecting our quality score or if they can see that this is something out of our control.

This site for example: http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html has generated a lot of truncated URLs on its site that link to pages that don't exist on our site: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri… That is the exact link that it is trying to locate.

Here is the report for that particular link. As you can see the content has been scraped by other sites which has spread the problem further.

Pages that link to http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/pri..

URL    Discovery Date
http://www.justsearchit.com.au/for_flowers_offers,3.html
Sep 12, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_for.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts_for.html
Sep 11, 2011
http://www.flexfinder.com/flowers_offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/offers_unique_gifts_with.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/com_offers_unique_gifts.html
Sep 10, 2011
http://sibd.com/of_flowers_offers_from.html
Sep 9, 2011
http://arama.frmpc.com/for_flowers_for_less_ltd_includes.html
Sep 9, 2011
http://arama.frmpc.com/flowers_for_less_than_do.html
Sep 9, 2011

I have spotted a lot of these and currently have around 3.3K 404s in total, a majority are from sites we don't control.

Is there an acceptable number of 404s a site should aim for and is the above something we should address or are Google smart enough to work out that we can't fix this ourselves?

Thanks!

Sam.

[mickey11]

use a link checker to figure all the links that are 404.

use mod rewrite to send them to the home page or  a given page when the one requested is not found.

google mod rewrite if you dont know wjhat it is

[NickEubanks]

Hey Sam,

I believe this can adversely effect your overall site rankings, not due to penalties from the 404's themselves, but due to the assumed high bounce rate on those pages - which is going to increase your site's overall average bounce rate - which Google will attribute to the value of your website's content.

Just as Manischa said, I would 301 these pages to functioning content pages if you do not plan on resurrecting them, and if you do I would use a 302 (temporary redirect) until you have the content back up on those pages at which point you remove the temporary redirect status.

Hope this helps.

-Nick

[Paessler]

I have had similar problems (although with fewer pages), and did not notice a negative effect. If you can, I would still try to 301 redirect the URLs these pages point to to real pages. This will also help users which might click on one of the links (but does anyone click on the links from these scraper pages? I have never seen anything in my referrals...)