Tim Berners-Lee, considered the father of the internet, established HTTP status codes during the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1992. For example, when you’re loading a regular webpage, it’s a “200 OK” request, which means it loaded without any problems. So why exactly is it 404? The first thing to realize is that there are other “numbers” related to the status of loading a webpage. “having a 404 error,” it means they’re slow to think or ignorant about a particular topic. It’s become a meme and slang term of its own. Its prevalence on the internet has made it one of the most well-known errors in the history of the web. Most content management systems (CMS) have features that attempt to minimize 404 redirects.

Frequent incidences of users being redirected to 404 pages can lead to a website getting categorized as “low-quality” or “untrustworthy” by Google’s algorithms. Some search engines explicitly penalize websites that contain a lot of broken links. Because of how bad it is for the end-users experience, sites are discouraged from linking to many 404 pages.

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