How to fix Invalid Product Page registering as Soft 404
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Somehow with our site architecture Google is crawling URLS for products we no longer carry (there are no links to those pages so I am still trying to figure out how Google is finding them).Those URLS are being redirected to our invalid product page. That invalid product page is returning a 200 OK code, but according to Google it should be a 404 so we get a soft 404 error. Google is seeing all of the URLs that redirect to that page as soft 404's as well.
The first solution I can think of is to create a custom 404 page that looks just like our site, says we don't have the page/product they are looking for, has a search bar, sends a 404 code, etc.
Is this the right way to go? And it will probably take some time to implement so is there a quick fix we could do first?
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Thanks for the input. Wanted to make sure I was on the right track and not missing anything. Wish 301 redirects to similar products were possible but we don't carry any version of those products on this site leaving no good redirect page.
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The soft 404 is Google's way of saying they want a more specific result. Either let it actually show a 404 result (vs a page that gives a 200 response but then displays a 404 type message - as you have done above) or 301 to a page that is semantically similar.
A true 404 page would work as you mention, but if there is a newer version of the same product or a related product that may help the user, you should consider using the 301. It can help with your SEO, but also, you can improve conversion rates as you are not requiring the user to "start over" to find what they need on your site.
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