error 404 GSC

In GSC, hover over one of the problem URLs and click the Inspect URL icon (magnifying glass). On the next screen, find out what the referring pages are. The problematic URLs appear on the referring pages somewhere. Those pages need to be corrected. The URL on the page can be sometimes hard to find because it’s not visible. View, then search the page’s source HTML for the problem URL. Where in the page it appears will be a clue to what part of the page needs to be corrected. Identifying the original source can sometimes still be difficult, but you need to start somewhere.

Should the 404 pages be fixed? do they affect my ranking in google?
The specific pages do not exist in any other way.
Here I show you by doing in the “url inspector” one of these pages.

https://ibb.co/vHfzLv6

This is the referral page. which I circled with red.

Inside this page there is the central image called piranha.jpeg
The url with 404 is called piranha-84 .

And this is done on all pages…

I think /piranha-84/ is supposed to be a media attachment link for the piranha.jpeg image. WP should normally serve such requests, but the related query is failing for some reason. In any case, there is no such link on the referring page, so it’s unclear how Googlebot decided it’s a link it should follow.

If none of those links appear on their referring pages, you should be able to tell GSC the issue has been fixed. Googlebot will then re-crawl the page, not find any such link, and the related GSC error will be removed. I would not advise marking them all as fixed all at once. I recommend initially marking only few as fixed, after confirming there’s no such link on each referring page. If GSC confirms the issue is fixed, I think you can safely do similarly for the other errors.

I’m not sure how a bunch of 404 errors would affect search ranking. They cannot expect you to do much about bad links from 3rd party sites. Since these are from your own site, you should be able to correct the errors. Such errors might reflect poorly on ranking if there are a lot of them. I’m only speculating, IDK. In any case, it doesn’t look like the links are actually there.

ok thanks!