404 not found page appears as 200 success in Google Fetch. What to do to correct?
-
We have received messages in Google webmaster tools that there is an increase in soft 404 errors.
When we check the URLs they send to the 404 not found page:
For example, http://www.geographics.com/images/01904_S.jpg
redirects to http://www.geographics.com/404.shtml.
When we used fetch as Google, here is what we got: .
#1 Server Response: http://www.geographics.com/404.shtml
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:26:59 GMT
What is wrong and what shall we do?The soft 404 errors are mainly for images that no longer exist in the server.
Thanks!
-
Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way, Alex. Unless the server returns an actual 404 response code in the header, search engines will not consider the page to be an error to be removed from their index. Even though the content of the page may look like an error page, the http response in the header is the only thing that determines whether the engines will treat it as a 404 error.
Paul
-
Your site is not handling "page not found" errors correctly, Madlena. Currently, when a user requests a URL that doesn't exist, your site is sending a 302 (temporary) redirect to an error page, but that error page's header is responding with a 200 status that means "page was found correctly".
You need to have your site's developer change that behaviour so that when a non-existent URL is requested, the server immediately returns a page that has a 404 not found header response (and no 302 redirect). This is necessary even if the page itself looks like a 404 error page.
ONLY by having the page return a 404 response code IN THE HEADER will that tell Google that the page doesn't actually exist and to drop the URL from the index. As Google themselves state - it’s not enough to just create a page that displays a 404 message. You also need to return the correct 404 or 410 HTTP response code.
Once this is configured properly, it's easier to keep track of these 404 errors so that you can fix them by manually 301-redirecting to a suitable page if there is one. (although this may not be the case with just images, it can be very useful in other cases.)
Hope that helps? If anything's not clear, just holler!
Paul
-
There's nothing to worry about. All Google is saying is that the image no longer exists and it's returning a 404 for that specific link "http://www.geographics.com/images/01904_S.jpg". When Google tries to fetch the broken URL, it's getting redirected to the 404 and it's saying that it's ok. We detect a 404 page and that fetches ok. However, the actual URL it was trying (the broken image) is not there. Google will automatically remove the 404s over time and there will be no negative impacts from this.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Pages Crawl Per Day Gone Drasitcaly Down, is it google issue?
Hello Expert, In search console in Crawl Stats Pages Crawl per day going day by day i.e. from 4 lac pages per day now it is reduce upto 2 lac in last 15 days. So where is the issue? Where I am going wrong or it is issue from google end? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Johny123450 -
Fetch as Google issues
HI all, Recently, well a couple of months back, I finally got around to switching our sites over to HTTPS://. In terms of rankings etc all looks fine and we have not move about much, only the usual fluctuations of a place or two on a daily basis in a competitive niche. All links have been updated, redirects in place, the usual https domain migration stuff. I am however, troubled by one thing! I cannot for love nor money get Google to fetch my site in GSC. No matter what I have tried it continues to display "Temporarily unreachable". I have checked the robots.txt and it is on a new https:// profile in GSC. Has anyone got a clue as I am stumped! Have I simply become blinded by looking too much??? Site in Q. caravanguard co uk. Cheers and looking forward to your comments.... Tim
Technical SEO | | TimHolmes0 -
Is my website indexed correctly in Google - www.couponshop.co.uk
Our website www.couponshop.co.uk has just had a relaunch after a change of direction.
Technical SEO | | LaurenGT
A lot of the pages were redirected. When I checked the indexing of the website on Google, I put site:couponshop.co.uk and only two pages come up, but when I put site:www.couponshop.co.uk they all show up.
Is this correct or are we doing something wrong?0 -
Page missing from Google index
Hi all, One of our most important pages seems to be missing from the Google index. A number of our collections pages (e.g., http://perfectlinens.com/collections/size-king) are thin, so we've included a canonical reference in all of them to the main collection page (http://perfectlinens.com/collections/all). However, I don't see the main collection page in any Google search result. When I search using "info:http://perfectlinens.com/collections/all", the page displayed is our homepage. Why is this happening? The main collection page has a rel=canonical reference to itself (auto-generated by Shopify so I can't control that). Thanks! WUKeBVB
Technical SEO | | leo920 -
404 Pages increasing day by day. Why??
Please look at my website, 404 Pages suddenly increasing in number. I have looked at the google webmaster tool and found it showing all my URLs in wrong format. This page is also not working I attached webmaster screenshot as well
Technical SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
Spam pages / content created due to hack. 404 cleanup.
A hosting company's server was hacked and one of our customer's sites was injected with 7,000+ pages of fake, bogus, promotional content. Server was patched and spammy content removed from the server. Reviewing Google Webmaster's Tools we have all the hacked pages showing up as 404's and have a severe drop in impressions, rank and traffic. GWT also has 'Some manual actions apply to specific pages, sections, or links'... What do you recommend for: Cleaning up 404's to spammy pages? (I am not sure redirect to home page is a right thing to do - is it?) Cleaning up links that were created off site to the spam pages Getting rank bank // what would you do in addition to the above?
Technical SEO | | GreenStone0 -
Should i put a full article on my home page to get google to visit more
Hi, our site is www.in2town.co.uk and i am thinking of putting an article on my home page in the middle under where it says lifestyle news, and getting rid of the middle column and instead have the latest news there to try and get google to visit more. I would like to know if you think this would look messy and not user friendly and if you think if i did do it would it get google to visit the site more often. all day we are always adding articles but on the home page it only shows a few lines of the article so i am concerned that these few lines are not getting google interested in visiting our site more often. we were on page one with our site but now since the upgrade we are on page eight so we are trying to combat this The article would change each time we put a new article on the site. so the article could be on there for ten mins before a new one is there any thoughts on this would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Is it better to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Is it better for SEO to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Technical SEO | | CustomOnlineMarketing0