What are Soft 404's and are they a problem
-
Hi,
I have some old pages that were coming up in google WMT as a 404. These had links into them so i thought i'd do a 301 back to either the home page or to a relevant category or page.
However these are now listed in WMT as soft 404's.
I'm not sure what this means and whether google is saying it doesn't like this?
Any advice welcomed.
-
Hi Jeff,
I had the same issue with a client last year. In a nut shell a soft 404 error is when the page looks like a regular 404 error web page but the http response header returns 200 OK. So search engines think that the page is okay (a regular webpage) but there is no content on that page etc.
Your webteam will need to identify how they are producing the soft 404 error pages (with 200OK header responses) and change that set-up in the CMS. Or, if these are old pages that are no longer required and are no longer driving traffic then archive/delete them.
Good luck,
Davinia -
Hi Jeff,
I'll take a snippit from the webmaster tools
"In addition to returning a 404 code in response to a request for a page that doesn’t exist, the server will also display a 404 page. This may be a standard "File Not Found" message, or it could be a custom page designed to provide the user with additional information. The content of the page is entirely unrelated to the HTTP response returned by the server. Just because a page displays a 404 File Not Found message doesn’t mean that it’s a 404 page. It's like a giraffe wearing a name tag that says "dog." Just because it says it's a dog, doesn't mean it's actually a dog. Similarly, just because a page says 404, doesn't mean it's returning a 404. You can use Fetch as Google (or other tools available on the web) to verify whether the URL is actually returning the correct code."
and to help here is another link
http://forums.seochat.com/search-engine-optimization-28/diff-between-404-soft-404-error-467526.html
"The error 404 "page not found" means that the page you are finding server can't find he page.
Soft 404 means page not found and user will move to either home page or custom page."Hope it helps.
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
-
Moved company 'Help Center' from Zendesk to Intercom, got lots of 404 errors. What now?
Howdy folks, excited to be part of the Moz community after lurking for years! I'm a few weeks into my new job (Digital Marketing at Rewind) and about 10 days ago the product team moved our Help Center from Zendesk to Intercom. Apparently the import went smoothly, but it's caused one problem I'm not really sure how to go about solving: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/*** is where all our articles used to sit https://help.rewind.io/*** is where all our articles now are So, for example, the following article has now moved as such: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001902152-Can-I-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind- https://help.rewind.io/general-faqs-and-billing/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind This has created a bunch of broken URLs in places like our Shopify/BigCommerce app listings, in our email drips, and in external resources etc. I've played whackamole cleaning many of these up, but these old URLs are still indexed by Google – we're up to 475 Crawl Errors in Search Console over the past week, all of which are 404s. I reached out to Intercom about this to see if they had something in place to help, but they just said my "best option is tracking down old links and setting up 301 redirects for those particular addressed". Browsing the Zendesk forms turned up some relevant-ish results, with the leading recommendation being to configure javascript redirects in the Zendesk document head (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) of individual articles. I'm comfortable setting up 301 redirects on our website, but I'm in a bit over my head in trying to determine how I could do this with content that's hosted externally and sitting on a subdomain. I have access to our Zendesk admin, so I can go in and edit stuff there, but don't have experience with javascript redirects and have read that they might not be great for such a large scale redirection. Hopefully this is enough context for someone to provide guidance on how you think I should go about fixing things (or if there's even anything for me to do) but please let me know if there's more info I can provide. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henrycabrown1 -
What's the best URL structure?
I'm setting up pages for my client's website and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this. Which of the following would be best (let's say the keywords being used are "sell xgadget" "sell xgadget v1" "sell xgadget v2" "sell xgadget v3" etc.). Domain name: sellgadget.com Potential URL structures: 1. sellxgadget.com/v1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zing-Marketing
2. sellxgadget.com/xgadget-v1
3. sellxgadget.com/sell-xgadget-v1 Which would be the best URL structure? Which has the least risk of being too keyword spammy for an EMD? Any references for this?0 -
Should you allow an auto dealer's inventory to be indexed?
Due to the way most auto dealership website populate inventory pages, should you allow inventory to be indexed at all? The main benefit us more content. The problem is it creates duplicate, or near duplicate content. It also creates a ton of crawl errors since the turnover is so short and fast. I would love some help on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gauge1230 -
- Truth ? ''link building isn't considered a suitable way of promotion as per recent search engine updates''
I need SEO. A SEO consultant said: ''link building isn't considered a suitable way of promotion as per recent search engine updates'' they mention: ''Therefore we would be undertaking a range of promotional exercises such as blog postings, social book marking, press release, etc that are more effective for ensuring best possible rankings for the website.'' Do you agree? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze2051 -
Multiple URL's exist for the same page, canonicaliazation issue?
All of the following URL's take me to the same page on my site: 1. www.mysite.com/category1/subcategory.aspx 2. www.mysite.com/subcategory.aspx 3. www.mysite.com/category1/category1/category1/subcategory.aspx All of those pages are canonicalized to #1, so is that okay? I was told the following my a company trying to make our sitemap: "the site's platform dynamically creates URLs that resolve as 200 and should be 404. This is a huge spider trap for any search engine and will make them wary of crawling the site." What would I need to do to fix this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0 -
Domain Age. What's a good age?
I have a new site that ranks very well and is rich with content. I know that it would rank better but since it's new I'm assuming that it is being held back. My question is how long does it take for a site to mature?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
I want your opinions on the lack of increase in Pintrest's PR
Many months ago, a fellow marketer at my company introduced me to Pintrest, claiming that it would be good for our business. Pintrest was very much unknown by many just a few short months ago. Since then, I have seen it take off like wildfire, with excessive media coverage, registrations, and people putting the button on their sites. It must have thousands more backlinks now than it did six months ago--high quality ones too, as it's had coverage in virtually every major new media outlet. I want your opinion as to why it has remained a PR6 site this entire time. It was a PR6 site then and it still is now. I know the increase in PR is algorithmic, but come on! Can people share their experiences they've had link building for those higher PR sites? How much harder does it get?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UnderRugSwept1 -
Competitior 'scraped' entire site - pretty much - what to do?
I just discovered a competitor in the insurance lead generation space has completely copied my client's site's architecture, page names, titles, even the form, tweaking a word or two here or there to prevent 100% 'scraping'. We put a lot of time into the site, only to have everything 'stolen'. What can we do about this? My client is very upset. I looked into filing a 'scraper' report through Google but the slight modifications to content technically don't make it a 'scraped' site. Please advise to what course of action we can take, if any. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seagreen
Greg0