The 404 audit that became a monthly habit

The problem

Soon after I joined, I spotted more than 100 404 errors a week across a multi-region website. Plenty of people had seen them. Nobody owned them.

What I did

• Audited everything that could plausibly be guilty: content, Search Console, Tag Manager, the CMS, hosting and the repository.
• Found the culprit: pages were being set to draft or deleted without Google being told, so the index and the site slowly drifted apart.
• Compared a snapshot of the Search Console index with the real sitemap, then cleaned up the drafts and deleted pages.
• Set up a monthly 404 report for every regional content manager. The SEO agency ran it first; we now run it in-house, and I trained a colleague to run it without me.

The result

From over 100 a week to about 10 to 15 a month, across the global site and 17 regional ones. The fix is a routine, not a heroic weekend, which is the point.