Should You Redirect 404s to the Homepage?

Google says no, but can you really trust them? Also no...

Author

Sean Markey
March 10, 2025

March 10, 2025

Hey hey, happy Monday to those who celebrate.

Today’s post is about something I saw this weekend when I was looking at SEO stuff while I should have been taking some time off but

SEO NEVER SLEEPS

or takes… the weekend off.

Anyway, pretty interesting topic, let’s kick it off with our sponsor (that’s me—want to sponsor this thing? Hit reply and LMK).

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On-page SEO

This guy at Google says you shouldn’t 301 your 404s to the homepage

Today we are looking at an article by SEJ talking about a recent Google “Office Hours Shorts” where Martin Splitt, a “developer advocate” (whatever that is) addressed a question about redirected 404 pages to the homepage.

The Quick Summary:

Google’s Developer Advocate says don’t 301 your 404s to the homepage because it confuses poor little Googlebot.

The Main Thing:

The question asked of Martin was does redirecting all 404 pages to the homepage with 301 redirects have a negative impact on rankings or overall website performance in search?”

Martin, the developer ADVOCATE answered “yes, and it annoys me as a user.” 🙄

Splitt offered clear guidance on proper redirects:

1. If content has moved to a new location, use a redirect to that specific new

2. URL If content is truly gone, maintain the 404 status code

3. Don’t redirect to the homepage or what you think is the “closest” match

My Take:

At this point with Google just straight up lying to us for years and years now (coooooouuuuuuuugh CTR as a ranking factor) it’s hard to know whether or not we should believe them.

DOES it make sense that Googlebot gets confused and stuck in a loop if you 301 dead pages to the homepage?

It’s conceivable, yes.

Does that mean it has a negative impact on your SEO, or a bigger negative impact than the positive impact gained by a) redirecting strong, authoritative pages back to the homepage, or b) not having 8,000 404 pages?

Mm.

I think there’s some nuance to be had here. And I am highly skeptical of Splitt saying “it annoys him as a user” in his official answer.

Is there an argument to be made that it IS annoying?

Sure.

Am I going to stop 301’ing dead pages to the homepage ESPECIALLY when there is big juice to be pushed along?

Am I fearful that this is going to affect Googlebot so much he shits on my site like a bird and flies off?

No and no.

I’ll keep an eye on it, and if there’s a problem ever with indexing I’ll eventually see what the redirect situation looks like and if it needs to be adjusted, but I’m not losing sleep over this issue, no matter how much it annoys Martin Splitt.

~

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Until next time,

sean