External 404 pages

[mkleamy]

A client of mine is linking to a third-party vendor from their main site. The page being linked to loads with a Page Not Found error and then replaces some application content once the Javascript kicks in. This process is not visible to users (the application loads fine for front-end users) but it is being picked up as a 404 error in broken link reports.

This link is part of the site skin so it's on every page. Outside of the annoyance of having lots of 404 errors being flagged in a broken link report, does this cause any actual issue?  Eg, do search enginges see that my client is linking to something that is a 404 error, and does that cause them any harm?

[sarahwalsh]

if you have 404 pages, this can significantly increase the website bounce rate,

negatively impacting the business's organic seo. We had a garden room company that specialised in building garden offices, and we had a lot of 404 pages.

we had to fix this, as the bounce rate, was relatively high.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Try to see if you can find a way to render the site that you're linking to, to figure out if they are actually returning the same response to Google. In itself, this shouldn't hurt anything as it's just one of the very many signals to Google about the quality of the page.