In Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) I am viewing the report at crawl > crawl errors. I see that Google has set a 'priority' for these 404s. I'm curious how Google determines what is a priority 404. Why is the first listed 404 URL a higher priority than my 300th listed 404 URL? Is this determined by the number of hits that 404 page is getting? Where does it show the count of 404s?
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1 Answer
In short, it's "a multitude of factors".
Here's the longer version:
We’ve ranked the errors so that those at the top of the priority list will be ones where there’s something you can do, whether that’s fixing broken links on your own site, fixing bugs in your server software, updating your Sitemaps to prune dead URLs, or adding a 301 redirect to get users to the “real” page. We determine this based on a multitude of factors, including whether or not you included the URL in a Sitemap, how many places it’s linked from (and if any of those are also on your site), and whether the URL has gotten any traffic recently from search.
It's from a blog post that is a few years old, so they might have changed their algorithms since then.
