<b>Q: Search Console is showing a spike in 404s after our move. Bad?</b>

<b>Q: Search Console is showing a spike in 404s after our move. Bad?</b>

Short answer: depends entirely on WHICH URLs are 404ing. Some are fine, some are emergencies.

Long answer: A post-migration 404 spike looks scary but breaks into three buckets:

— Real pages that should redirect but don't — these are emergencies, fix today.
— Junk URLs (old parameters, spam links, ancient deleted pages) — a 404 or 410 is the correct answer, ignore them.
— Internal links you forgot to update, now pointing at dead old URLs — fix the links, not just the redirect.

The mistake is treating all 404s as equally bad and panic-redirecting everything to the homepage (see the soft-404 trap).

Next step: export the 404 report, sort by which had traffic or backlinks. Anything that earned clicks or has links pointing at it gets a proper 301 to its new equivalent. The rest can stay 404 or move to 410 — Google drops them cleanly.