301 Redirects and 404 Errors: How They Affect SEO

Every website accumulates broken links over time — a service page gets renamed, an old blog post is deleted, a URL structure changes during a redesign. Left unmanaged, these small breakages add up to lost rankings, frustrated visitors, and pages that quietly stop earning traffic.

Quick answer: A 301 redirect permanently sends visitors and search engines from an old URL to a new one, preserving most of the original page’s ranking value. A 404 error means a page cannot be found at all — a dead end that hurts user experience and wastes any authority the old page had built up.

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