Should You Avoid Naming Your Company Or Product 404?

We know that sometimes Google can be triggered to treat your pages as a soft 404, essentially Google thinks that page should be 404ed and thus removed from the search results. So one SEO asked if he should avoid naming his new product or service with the name 404 in it?

Matt Tutt, an SEO, asked John Mueller “I’m planning a top secret SEO conference, and priorities first, plan on launching a range of merchandise to fully cash-in on the event. First up is a 100% woollen, handmade bumbag. I was going to name the product “this is not a 404” alas fear it might inadvertently trigger a “soft 404″ error; and so I am wondering if, from a marketing perspective, is it in fact a terrible idea to include the numbers 404 in the product name itself? It will be used on the page title after all…”

John Mueller of Google responded that there are products already named 404, like 404 wheel and a search for [404 wheel] returns products named 404 wheel:

John wrote “Anecdotally the “404” products i know of rank normally. Try searching for “404 wheel” for example. If you called it “404 not found” i think you might have a harder time, but even those search results aren’t empty.”

So I guess if you are going with the name 404 or you sell t-shirts named “404 not found” you probably need to be careful and keep an close eye on how Google handles it.

Here are those tweets:

Afternoon @JohnMu! Quick q… I’m planning a top secret SEO conference, and priorities first, plan on launching a range of merchandise to fully cash-in on the event. First up is a 100% woollen, handmade bumbag. I was going to name the product “this is not a 404” alas fear it…

— Matt Tutt (@MattTutt1) April 21, 2022

Anecdotally the “404” products i know of rank normally. Try searching for “404 wheel” for example. If you called it “404 not found” i think you might have a harder time, but even those search results aren’t empty.

— 🦙 johnmu.xml (personal) 🦙 (@JohnMu) April 21, 2022

Forum discussion at Twitter.