HTML snapshot creating soft 404
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Has anyone any experience with HTML snapshots? We have a recruitment client that has HTML snapshots against all job pages as they are built with AJAX.
The pages naturally die after around four weeks (the job vacancy runs out) and whilst the AJAX version of the page hard 404s, the HTML snapshot version returns a soft 404. How can we get it to mirror the dead page with 404 status?
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A side note first. Something to consider on transient content for job listings like this that I have used on job sites I have worked on and worked pretty well - The unavailable after meta tag
http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-seo-advice-unavailable-e-commerce-products-186882
"The “unavailable_after” Meta tag will allow you to tell Google that a page should expire from the search results at a specific time. "
This way your pages would be removed from the index on the date you list and if you have also removed the links from your sitemap etc, Google may not need to crawl them and find the 404 and/or soft404 to begin with.
The soft 404 (according to Google) means your server is not showing a 404 server response for the HTML snapshot version. I would try fetch as Google on those pages to see what Google is seeing and that may help you diagnose the situation. I may be that your server is giving a different response than the 404 and Google is questioning it.
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