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What to do with 8.6 million 404 pages
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You can filter GSC results to your site map. Make sure your site maps are clean and then it will help you better identify how much of the problem is your actual site compared to old urls.
Then use analitics to discover pages not in your sitemap that are getting traffic focus on these based on highest traffic.
Plenty of other good answers in the comments.
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Simple Solution: create a sacrifical page, 301 all of the pages via htaccess to the 301 page and ask Google to validate “fix”
Dont worry about error “statuses” in GSC – these are surface/veneer issues. Contrary to how most people “think” about SEO, Google doesn’t keep a running score or “ding” you for doing things. Its just mathematics. You either get authority, apply it to your pages, have the right relevance and rank or you don’t. There’s no magic, there’s no % score, no scale, no three strikes. Its just math. Like Ad Rank – which is QS X $bid = Ad Rank but a little more complex.
Its just Google telling you that a bunch of URLs in a list returned a 404 and its up to you if you want to worry about ti or not, but its not Google saying ‘You need to fix this or we’ll apply some kind of penalty”
HTH
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If the products are gone then I would create redirects to categories with similar products. At least capture that traffic but I don’t know why there aren’t backups for those products that have 0 inventory to bring them back into shopify.
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If you are using a tool like semrush or ahrefs check the 404 section, they list the links in terms of priority. You need to focus on the ones that will give you most impact. (Tools show you the priority by scoring)
Once you get priority sorted out, decided wether you want to work the 301 on collection pages, product pages, info pages or blog pages. (Assuming you have all pages optimized for engagement then you have more chances of recovering lost traffic) Choose page redirect from search intent of the 404 page. Always choose the shortest path to a sale
If you need to confirm urls as 404 place them on a sheet and confirm pages are really 404. You can. Google for formula or script to help you.
Get the Shopify import template and merge your 404 priority list.. when ready import list by batch, no need to single entries (waste of time) Shopify will create and confirm if the list is valid (saves time) and show you which redirects are confirmed working.
Repeat process but don’t waste time on less powerful 404.. you can do blanket redirect to product category.
Don’t leave the 404s, manage it before it manages you. Save the link juice or potential traffic from an old page that has stray traffic.
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Wow, 8.6 million 404s? That’s a nightmare! Have you considered implementing a custom 404 page that still provides value to users and search engines? Also, setting up a ‘retired product’ page with a canonical to the original product category might help with the crawl errors.
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I suggest to implement 301 redirects. This sends users from the broken page to a relevant existing page on your site. Choose redirects that logically replace the missing content.
For example, a 404 for a product page could redirect to the main product category page.
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