How to remove 404 pages wordpress

[DJDavid]

I used the crawl tool and it return a 404 error for several pages that I no longer have published in Wordpress. They must still be on the server somewhere?

Do you know how to remove them? I think they are not a file on the server like an html file since Wordpress uses databases?

I figure that getting rid of the 404 errors will improve SEO is this correct?

Thanks,

David

[JVRudnick]

Yeah...as others have noted, there often is the live link somewhere else that points to a page that is now gone...

So a 404 really is the LINK page....as long as it's out there, it'll point to that non-existant page....so a 301 can help, or (this was fun) you can 301 the incoming 404 link BACK to the linking page itself....

teeHee...yeah, not such a good idea but a tactic that we did have to use about 4 years ago to get a spam directory to "buzz off!!!"

[adamxj2]

Hey David

Once you publish a page/post in WordPress and submit a sitemap, you are stuck with those pages. I've experienced this problem a lot as I use WordPress often. Once you trash a page there and delete it permanently, it's not stored anywhere in the WordPress CMS. They are just reading as 404s since they existed and now no longer exist.

As stated above, just make sure you are not linking to your trashed page anywhere in your site.

I've done a couple things with 404 Pages on my WordPress sites:

1. Make an awesome 404 page so that people will stay on the site if they found your 404 page on accident. Google will eventually stop crawling 404s so this is a good temporary way to engage users.

2. 301 Redirect the 404s to relevant pages. This helps keep your link juice and also helps with the user experience (since they are reaching a relevant page)

Hope that helps!

[irvingw]

404's are a natural part of websites, Google understands that. As long as you don't have links to pages on your site that are 404'ing you're fine. So basically, just make sure your website is not the source of your 404's.

[Linda-Vassily]

Anything you type after your domain which isn't an actual page will return a not found error; it doesn't mean the page exists somewhere. [Try entering yourdomain.com/anythingyouwant and you will get a 404.] Or am I misunderstanding the question? In any case, 404 errors are not necessarily bad for SEO, as long as they are not harming the user experience.