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Are 404 Errors killing your quality score? Do you just discount a high number of daily errors as part of running a large website? There is absolutely no reason why any website, big or small, should ignore their quality score with search engines. Cleaning up loose ends and bad redirects are the lowest of the low hanging fruit. Actually, I wouldn’t even say it’s hanging, it’s good fruit that just feel to the ground perfectly ripe, all you need to do is pick it up. It’s not difficult to log into Webmaster tools, grab 90% of the bad pages, and throw them through a server side program like redirection for a quick fix. You’d be surprised how often and how easily this will give you a quick rankings boost site wide.
I will always be a huge proponent of quality score improvements, because they affect your domain as a whole. It’s not on page optimization or painful back link campaigns, just one change that improves rankings for every single page indexed. These kinds of changes aren’t popular, or glamorous. Much like code cleanup and W3C validation, it takes real swagger to get these changes implemented when you are working in a group setting. You have to see them as something that is vital to your websites health.
When I was a personal trainer I had the hardest time getting people to understand the simplest truths about fitness. The two things that people don’t do enough of is sleep and drinking water. It doesn’t matter how much you lift weights, how much yoga or cardio you put your body through, without adequate sleep and hydration it’s all for naught. But drinking water isn’t glamorous, and neither is getting a full 8 hours of sleep a night. Same thing with errors in your code and site structure, but it just has to be done. It’s the foundation of everything else you plan to build on.