Can 404 Pages Affect Rankings?

404 pages themselves don’t directly affect rankings, but they can indirectly impact search engine optimization (SEO) in the following ways:

1. Poor user experience: Search engines consider user experience as a ranking factor. A high number of 404 pages can create a negative user experience, which can negatively impact your rankings.
2. Broken links: If there are many broken links on your website, it can lead to crawl errors, which can impact your website’s ability to rank well in search results.
3. Loss of link equity: When a page returns a 404 error, any links pointing to that page are essentially broken and no longer pass link equity to your website. This can result in a loss of ranking power and visibility in search results.