While many SEOs put a great emphasis on having technically flawless sites, the reality is that many website owners have sites with plenty of technical problems and issues.  And many believe that a technically perfect site will outrank a competitor’s site with errors.  In the last Google Webmaster Hangout, John Mueller said that in general, technical problems on a site are not a ranking problem.

The question: Would there be a small ranking benefit if we compared the same site once with a lot of 404 and soft 404s present and other technical problems such as wrong hreflangs and no canonical tags in comparison to the same site in “perfect” technical condition ?

Here is his response.

Again there are the two aspects here.  On one hand the crawling and indexing part and on the other hand, the ranking part.

When we look at the ranking part and we essentially find all of these problems then in general, that’s not going to be a problem.  Where you might see some effect is with the hreflang markup because with the hreflang markup we can show the right pages in the search results, it’s not that those pages would rank better but you’d have the right pages ranking in the search results.

With regards to 404s and soft 404s, those are all technical issues that any site can have, and that’s not something we would count against a website.

This also confirms what Gary Illyes said on Twitter earlier this week that 404s do not cause a Google penalty.

On the other hand, for crawling and indexing, if you have all of these problems with your website, you have a complicated URL structure that’s really hard to crawl,  that is really hard for us to figure out which version of these URLs we should be indexing, there’s no canonical, all of that kind of adds up and makes it harder for us to crawl and index these pages optimally.

So what might happen is we get stuck and crawl a lot of cruft and then not notice there’s some great new content that we’re missing out on.  So that’s something that could be happening there.

It’s not that we would count technical issues against a site when it comes to ranking but rather that these technical issues can cause technical problems that can result in things not being processed optimally.

Bottom line, fix your technical issues because there are definite benefits in helping Google understand the correct content to rank.  But technical issues in itself won’t cause additional ranking problems.

Added: Obviously, there are a ton of other issues outside of this question that can cause major ranking issues… SEO experts are always discovering new ways that webmasters have managed to cause issues with ranking, along with some of the usual issues seen, whether it is accidentally blocking Googlebot from crawling a site or not bothering to upgrade known known exploits in popular WordPress plugins that causes the hacked warning to show up in the search results.