Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?

[nicole.healthline]

We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages).

Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?

[CleverPhD]

Me too.  It was that video that helped to clear things up for me.  Then I could see when to use robots.txt vs the noindex meta tag.  It has made a big difference in how I manage sites that have large amounts of content that can be sorted in a huge number of ways.

[Highland]

Good stuff. I was always under the impression they still crawled them (otherwise, how would you know if the block was removed).

[CleverPhD]

Take a look at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0

to see what I am talking about.

Robots.txt does prevent crawling according to Matt Cutts.

[Highland]

Robots.txt prevents indexation, not crawling. The good news is that Googlebot stops crawling 404s.

[CleverPhD]

Just a couple of under the hood things to check.

1. Are you sure your robots.txt is setup correctly. Check in GWT to see that Google is reading it.

2. This may be a timing issue.  Errors take 30-60 days to drop out (as what I have seen) so did they show soft 404 and then you added them to robots.txt?

If that was the case, this may be a sequence issue.  If Google finds a soft 404 (or some other error) then it comes back to spider and is not able to crawl the page due to robots.txt - it does not know what the current status of the page is so it may just leave the last status that it  found.

3. I tend to see soft 404 for pages that you have a 301 redirect on where you have a many to one association.  In other words, you have a bunch of pages that are 301ing to a single page.  You may want to consider changing where some of the 301s redirect so that they going to a specific page vs an index page.

4. If you have a page in robots.txt - you do not want them in Google, here is what I would do.   Show a 200 on that page but then put in the meta tags a noindex nofollow.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710

"When we see the noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it"

Let Google spider it so that it can see the 200 code - you get rid of the soft 404 errors.  Then toss in the noindex nofollow meta tags to have the page removed from the Google index.  It sounds backwards that you have to let Google spider to get it to remove stuff, but it works it you walk through the logic.

Good luck!