Quick answer
A 404 flood — hundreds or thousands of 404 errors generated in a short period — wastes your crawl budget, dilutes your site’s authority signals, and can cause search engines to de-prioritise your healthy pages. The most common causes are bot sweeps, deleted pages with inbound links, and broken redirects. Monitoring your 404 rate and investigating spikes quickly limits the SEO damage.
WP Canary monitors your 404 rate automatically — free forever. Get alerted to flood-level spikes before they affect your search rankings.
Download free plugin