Google On 404 Errors And Ranking Drops Google's Gary Illyes answered a question about a ranking drop that appeared to be connected to 404 page not found errors ...

When you visit a broken page at the Stars and Stripes website, you get a mock-up of the newspaper’s front page, complete with “404” paratroopers repelling down to fix the problem.

Google's John Mueller offers good news for web publishers concerned about why Google crawls 404 and 410 pages.

It is a good thing that Google retries old 404 URLs. I mean, what if you put new content on a URL that once was 404ed, don't you want Google to find it? Forum discussion at Twitter.

As we've written in the past, 404 pages are an opportunity for startups and companies to have a little bit of geeky fun. Twitter has the Fail Whale, Google had its own version of the Fail Whale ...