Soft 404s for unpublished & 301'd content
-
Hi,
One site I work with unpublished a lot of thin content. Great idea, right?
These unpublished pages were then 301'd up to the main category page that they previously existed in.
Now Google Webmaster Tools calls them out as soft 404 errors. This seems unexpected since the pages
were 301'd. Here is my question; Is this a serious problem that may affect the site's overall organic results
and if so what should I do about it?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Short answer: create a custom 404 page, not just for these pages, but one that can show for everypage on your site.
A few resources:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93641?hl=en
Example: http://moz.com/sadfklfadsadfjs
-
Cyrus, thanks for hanging in there with my questions. If I just give back a 404, what am I showing them on the page?
I would think seeing the main questions page would be better than just sitting at the original url and looking at 404 page notice - seems like a bad user experience if Google wants to get all user-experiency about it.
Thanks... Darcy
-
Yes, it's possible, but that could be considered cloaking. I'd say best to return a 404.
-
Hi Cyrus,
Have not experienced a dip, but things have been a little static.
Can you do both... forward the page and give back a 404?
What would you do?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Yes, I would think that at the point Google crawls it and finds it forwarded it would drop it from the index and not waste resources crawling it again unless linked somewhere. I will keep an eye out for links, but don't believe that there are any.
Thanks, Dirk... Darcy
-
In that case, sounds like you should either:
- 404 them if you have evidence these have hurt your rankings/traffic (have you experienced a dip?)
- Ignore them and go about your day
-
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for the info. These are forum pages where no one ever answered the question, so
there is no helpful info and very little content.
They were forwarded up to the main questions page (one / up the url structure).
The page they were forwarded to is like a questions category page, not specific to the subject of the
forwarded page. These forwarded pages don't get much/any traffic because they never ranked
and we didn't promote them.
If it doesn't hurt overall search on other pages, I'd rather not go to the substantial effort of finding subject-relevant pages to forward to, since no one will ever go to the original url and need to see something super relevant.
Your thoughts? Thanks! Best... Darcy
-
If Fetch like Google is also giving a 301 - I would mark them as solved in WMT & check if they re-appear.
If you click on the i next to the redirect message in Fetch like Google - it shows the type of redirect & the page it's redirecting to. I assume you checked that this is also a 301.I have a similar issue on one of my sites - if a user gets to a non-existing url - the server first tries to find out if the page exists - if it doesn't it's redirected to a 404 page. Although technically it is a 301 - WMT sees them as a soft 404 as the destination page is a "Page not found" type of page (called 404.php) - which (quite ironically) renders a 200 status.
On the destination page - do you mention somewhere a message like "page not found" or is it just a plain category page?
The SEO impact is difficult to assess - Google says these pages are mainly wasting the bot's time as it's indexing pages that do no longer exist, not sure if it is also affecting rankings. As you did the crawl with Screaming Frog, I guess you are also removing all internal links to these redirected pages? If these links disappear, and as the content was thin, I suspect you don't have many external links pointing to them, so the problem should disappear after a while.
rgds,
Dirk
-
If Google thinks the 301 leads to a page that isn't relevant enough, they may flag it as a "soft 404" even though it returns a 301. That's Google's way of saying they think you should 404 these pages instead.
How much will it hurt you? Probably not much, but it's hard to say.
Let's ask these questions:
- How much traffic goes to these pages? If not much, is it okay to 404 them?
- Are there more relevant pages you could redirect these to? (ideally, something with a similar title as the original page?)
- Have you seen much traffic loss overall? If not, it's likely this isn't hurting you.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
Okay, that is extra weird. It could be that GWT hasn't update your information since you made the changes. Since everywhere else is telling it's correct -- especially the fetch tool -- then you should wait a few more days and see if it updates.
-
Hi Erica,
I'm saying that the only place it shows a soft 404 is in GWT errors. Screaming Frog, web-sniffer and now Fetch As Google In GWT, all show them as 301 re-directs. I can't re-direct them more than they are. So, is GWT just goofy?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Hi Darcy,
Yeah, if it's still showing as a soft 404, there's still something wrong. I'd try using fetch and render as Google bot and see what happens.
Best of luck!
-
Hi Dirk,
Thanks for the suggestion. As noted above, I put the whole list thru screaming frog and a few thru your suggestion of web-sniffer.net.
95% of the whole list is 301s and 100% of the few put one at a time thru web-sniffer come back as 301s.
My question remains "Is this a serious problem that may affect the site's overall organic results
and if so what should I do about it?"
Thanks... Darcy
-
Hi Erica,
I put the list through screaming frog and 95% of the urls are shown as 301s.
Do you think screaming frog has it right or is there something they wouldn't catch?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Maybe an obvious question but did you check that the url's are indeed properly redirected - checking them with 'Fetch like Google' in WMT or by using a tool like web-sniffer.net?
rgds,
Dirk
-
I'd check to make sure your 301s were done correctly. If they are showing up as soft 404s, they are probably implemented wrong.
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
-
Switching from HTTP to HTTPS: 301 redirect or keep both & rel canonical?
Hey Mozzers, I'll be moving several sites from HTTP to HTTPS in the coming weeks (same brand, multiple ccTLDs). We'll start on a low traffic site and test it for 2-4 weeks to see the impact before rolling out across all 8 sites. Ideally, I'd like to simply 301 redirect the HTTP version page to the HTTPS version of the page (to get that potential SEO rankings boost). However, I'm concerned about the potential drop in rankings, links and traffic. I'm thinking of alternative ways and so instead of the 301 redirect approach, I would keep both sites live and accessible, and then add rel canonical on the HTTPS pages to point towards HTTP so that Google keeps the current pages/ links/ indexed as they are today (in this case, HTTPS is more UX than for SEO). Has anyone tried the rel canonical approach, and if so, what were the results? Do you recommend it? Also, for those who have implemented HTTPS, how long did it take for Google to index those pages over the older HTTP pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steven_Macdonald0 -
Alt tag for src='blank.gif' on lazy load images
I didn't find an answer on a search on this, so maybe someone here has faced this before. I am loading 20 images that are in the viewport and a bit below. The next 80 images I want to 'lazy-load'. They therefore are seen by the bot as a blank.gif file. However, I would like to get some credit for them by giving a description in the alt tag. Is that a no-no? If not, do they all have to be the same alt description since the src name is the same? I don't want to mess things up with Google by being too aggressive, but at the same time those are valid images once they are lazy loaded, so would like to get some credit for them. Thanks! Ted
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Google Not Seeing My 301's
Good Morning! So I have recently been putting in a LOT of 301's into the .htaccess, no 301 plugins here, and GWMT is still seeing a lot of the pages as soft 404's. I mark them as fixed, but they come back. I will also note, the previous webmaster has ample code in our htaccess which is rewriting our URL structure. I don't know if that is actually having any effect on the issue but I thought I would add that. All fo the 301's are working, Google isn't seeing them. Thanks Guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
How do I get rel='canonical' to eliminate the trailing slash on my home page??
I have been searching high and low. Please help if you can, and thank you if you spend the time reading this. I think this issue may be affecting most pages. SUMMARY: I want to eliminate the trailing slash that is appended to my website. SPECIFIC ISSUE: I want www.threewaystoharems.com to showing up to users and search engines without the trailing slash but try as I might it shows up like www.threewaystoharems.com/ which is the canonical link. WHY? and I'm concerned my back-links to the link without the trailing slash will not be recognized but most people are going to backlink me without a trailing slash. I don't want to loose linkjuice from the people and the search engines not being in consensus about what my page address is. THINGS I"VE TRIED: (1) I've gone in my wordpress settings under permalinks and tried to specify no trailing slash. I can do this here but not for the home page. (2) I've tried using the SEO by yoast to set the canonical page. This would work if I had a static front page, but my front page is of blog posts and so there is no advanced page settings to set the canonical tag. (3) I'd like to just find the source code of the home page, but because it is CSS, I don't know where to find the reference. I have gone into the css files of my wordpress theme looking in header and index and everywhere else looking for a specification of what the canonical page is. I am not able to find it. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (4) Went into cpanel file manager looking for files that contain Canonical. I only found a file called canonical.php . the only thing that seemed like it was worth changing was changing line 139 from $redirect_url = home_url('/'); to $redirect_url = home_url(''); nothing happened. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (5) I have gone through the .htaccess file and put thes 4 lines at the top (didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) and then at the bottom of the file (also didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) : RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dillman
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?threewaystoharems.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.%1threewaystoharems.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Please help friends.0 -
Removing content from Google's Indexes
Hello Mozers My client asked a very good question today. I didn't know the answer, hence this question. When you submit a 'Removing content for legal reasons report': https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_legalother?product=websearch will the person(s) owning the website containing this inflammatory content recieve any communication from Google? My clients have already had the offending URL removed by a court order which was sent to the offending company. However now the site has been relocated and the same content is glaring out at them (and their potential clients) with the title "Solicitors from Hell + Brand name" immediately under their SERPs entry. **I'm going to follow the advice of the forum and try to get the url removed via Googles report system as well as the reargard action of increasing my clients SERPs entries via Social + Content. ** However, I need to be able to firmly tell my clients the implications of submitting a report. They are worried that if they rock the boat this URL (with open access for reporting of complaints) will simply get more inflammatory)! By rocking the boat, I mean, Google informing the owners of this "Solicitors from Hell" site that they have been reported for "hosting defamatory" content. I'm hoping that Google wouldn't inform such a site, and that the only indicator would be an absence of visits. Is this the case or am I being too optimistic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | catherine-2793880 -
Duplicate Content
http://www.pensacolarealestate.com/JAABA/jsp/HomeAdvice/answers.jsp?TopicId=Buy&SubtopicId=Affordability&Subtopicname=What%20You%20Can%20Afford http://www.pensacolarealestate.com/content/answers.html?Topic=Buy&Subtopic=Affordability I have no idea how the first address exists at all... I ran the SEOMOZ tool and I got 600'ish DUPLICATE CONTENT errors! I have errors on content/titles etc... How do I get rid of all the content being generated from this JAABA/JSP "jibberish"? Please ask questions that will help you help me. I have always been 1st on google local and I have a business that is starting to hurt very seriously from being number three 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JML11790 -
What to do when unique content is out of the question?
SEO companies/people are always stating that unique, quality content is one of the best things for SEO... But what happens when you can't do that? I've got a movie trailer blog and of late a lot of movie agencies are now asking us to use the text description they give us along with the movie trailer. This means that some pages are going to have NO unique content. What do you do in a situation like this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor0 -
Help With Preferred Domain Settings, 301 and Duplicate Content
I've seen some good threads developed on this topic in the Q&A archives, but feel this topic deserves a fresh perspective as many of the discussion were almost 4 years old. My webmaster tools preferred domain setting is currently non www. I didn't set the preferred domain this way, it was like this when I first started using WM tools. However, I have built the majority of my links with the www, which I've always viewed as part of the web address. When I put my site into an SEO Moz campaign it recognized the www version as a subdomain which I thought was strange, but now I realize it's due to the www vs. non www preferred domain distinction. A look at site:mysite.com shows that Google is indexing both the www and non www version of the site. My site appears healthy in terms of traffic, but my sense is that a few technical SEO items are holding me back from a breakthrough. QUESTION to the SEOmoz community: What the hell should I do? Change the preferred domain settings? 301 redirect from non www domain to the www domain? Google suggests this: "Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer." Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC1