A 404 is someone arriving at an address on your site that no longer answers. TamRank logs every one of them, so instead of guessing which links are broken you can read the list, see which ones people actually hit, and turn the worthwhile ones into redirects in a couple of clicks. This page shows how to work that list.
In short
- Go to TamRank → 404 Monitor.
- Sort your attention by hits. A URL hit fifty times matters; one hit once does not.
- Select the URLs worth saving and click Create Redirect.
- Ignore the rest, or clear the log.
What the log records, and what it does not
The monitor lists each missing URL with how many times it was requested and when it was last seen. That is deliberately all of it.
TamRank does not log IP addresses, user agents or referrers. No visitor data is stored, which means the 404 log is not a personal data record, does not need a retention policy of its own, and cannot leak anything about who visited you. It is a list of addresses and counts.
The trade-off is honest: you cannot tell from this screen whether a 404 came from a real visitor following a link on another site, or from a bot probing for a login page. What you can tell is how often it happened, and in practice that is the signal that matters. Something requested a hundred times is worth fixing whether or not you know who asked.
Deciding what to fix
Not every 404 deserves a redirect. Most do not. Work down this order:
- High hit counts first. These are the ones costing you real visits.
- URLs that look like your own old pages. A path that reads like a post you renamed or deleted is almost certainly a link that used to work, and there is probably still something linking to it.
- Anything that appeared right after you changed something. A restructure, a bulk delete, a theme change. Recent 404s in a cluster usually share one cause.
- Ignore the scanner noise. Requests for
/wp-loginvariants,/.env,/admin, phpMyAdmin paths and similar are bots looking for a way in. They are not broken links and they need no redirect. Select them and use Ignore.
Creating a redirect from a 404
Select one or more rows and an action bar appears with Create Redirect and Ignore. Choosing Create Redirect opens a panel with the 404 URL already filled in, so you only supply the destination and the type. Select several rows first and you can send them all to the same destination in one go.
Pick 301 when there is a genuine replacement. Pick 410 when the content is gone for good and nothing replaces it: that tells search engines to drop the URL, which is cleaner than sweeping every dead page into your homepage. A 410 does not need a destination at all.
Once an active redirect exists for a URL, TamRank stops reporting it as a problem. It disappears from the dashboard task list and from the counters here. The log entries are not deleted, they are filtered, so deactivating the redirect brings the warning back.
Keeping the log manageable
TamRank prunes the log for you once a day: entries older than 90 days are removed, and the table is capped at 5000 rows so a burst of bot traffic cannot let it grow without bound. This runs automatically on both plans and there is nothing to configure.
Two manual tools sit in the header. Export CSV saves the current list, grouped by URL and sorted by hits, which is the right move before any clear-out and useful for handing a list of broken links to whoever maintains the site that is linking to you. Clear Log empties it.
Clearing is safe. It removes the record of the problem, not any redirect you created from it.
Tip: an empty 404 log is not the goal
You will never get this list to zero, and chasing that wastes an afternoon. Bots will always probe for paths that do not exist, and old links on the wider internet will always point at pages you removed years ago. A 404 is also a perfectly valid answer: it is what a deleted page is supposed to return.
Check the monitor after any change to your URL structure, then roughly once a month. Fix what has real hits, ignore the noise, and let the rest sit. Ten minutes a month is the whole job.
Troubleshooting
The 404 Monitor is empty. Either nothing has hit a missing URL yet, which is good news, or 404 monitoring is switched off under TamRank → Settings → Features.
A URL keeps coming back after I redirected it. Check the redirect is Active and that its source matches the logged path exactly, including any trailing slash.
The log is filling with obvious bot requests. That is normal for any site on the open internet. Ignore them; the daily prune and the row cap keep the table in check.
I cannot tell where a 404 came from. By design. TamRank stores no referrer or user agent. Use the URL pattern and the hit count to judge it, or check your server logs if you need the origin.
A page I deleted on purpose keeps being reported. Give it a 410 rather than a redirect. That is the correct answer for content that is genuinely gone, and it stops the reporting.
Frequently asked questions
Does the 404 log store visitor data?
No. Only the URL, a hit count and a timestamp. No IP addresses, user agents or referrers.
Is there a limit on how many 404s are logged?
No tier limit. Entries older than 90 days are pruned daily and the table is capped at 5000 rows, on both plans, purely to keep it healthy.
Do 404s hurt my rankings?
Not in themselves. What costs you is losing the value of links pointing at pages that used to work, which is exactly what this screen helps you find.
Should I redirect everything?
No. Redirect what has a genuine replacement, use 410 for what is deliberately gone, and ignore bot noise.
Where do the redirects I create here end up?
In the redirect manager, alongside the ones you add by hand.
Related
- The rules themselves: Managing redirects in TamRank
- Bringing old rules with you: Migrating from Yoast or Rank Math
- The bigger picture: The complete WordPress SEO guide
- Back to Documentation
