So there you are, minding your own business, using Webmaster Tools to check out how awesome your site is... but, wait! The Crawl errors page is full of 404 (Not found) errors ! Is disaster imminent?? Fear not, my young padawan. Let’s take a look at 404s and how they do (or do not) affect your site: Q: Do the 404 errors reported in Webmaster Tools affect my site’s ranking? A: 404s are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this; we have 404 errors on our own sites, as you can see above, and we find them all over the web. In fact, we actually prefer that, when you get rid of a page on your site, you make sure that it returns a proper 404 or 410 response code (rather than a “soft 404”). Keep in mind that in order for our crawler to see the HTTP response code of a URL, it has to be able to crawl that URL—if the URL is blo