Soft 404s for unpublished & 301'd content

[94501]

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One site I work with unpublished a lot of thin content.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These unpublished pages were then 301'd up to the main category page that they previously existed in.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

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=custom+404&pws=0&gl=us&gws_rd=ssl#pws=0&gl=us&q=how+to+create+a+custom+404

[94501]

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

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Yes, it's possible, but that could be considered cloaking. I'd say best to return a 404.

[94501]

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

[94501]

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

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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

[94501]

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

[DirkC]

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

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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.

[EricaMcGillivray]

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.

[94501]

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

[EricaMcGillivray]

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!

[94501]

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

[94501]

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

[DirkC]

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

[EricaMcGillivray]

I'd check to make sure your 301s were done correctly. If they are showing up as soft 404s, they are probably implemented wrong.