Are these Search Console crawl errors a major concern to new client site?

[localwork]

We recently (4/1) went live with a new site for a client of ours. The client site was originally Point2 before they made the switch to a template site with Real Estate Webmasters. Now when I look into the Search Console I am getting the following Crawl Errors:

• 111 Server Errors (photos)
• 104 Soft 404s (blogs, archives, tags)
• 6,229 Not Found (listings)

I have a few questions. The server errors I know not a lot about so I generally ignore. My main concerns are the 404s and not found. The 404s are mostly tags and blog archives which I wonder if I should leave alone or do 301s for each to /blog.

For not found, these are all the previous listings from the IDX. My assumption is these will naturally fall away after some time, as the new ones have already indexed. But I wonder what I should be doing here and which will be affecting me.

When we launched the new site there was a large spike in clicks ( 250% increase) which has now tapered off to an average of ~85 clicks versus ~160 at time of launch. Not sure if the Crawl Errors have any effect, I'm guessing not so much right now.

I'd appreciate your insights Mozzers!

[MikeRoberts]

The Soft 404s are probably because the archive and/or tag pages that they are crawling are predominantly empty and look like a 404'd page that is returning a 200. If google is already indexing the actual articles/blog posts then you can most likely safely NoIndex the archive pages and tag pages. Many of those pages exist for the visitor but wind up creating other problems like duplicate content issues, soft 404, and so on.

Anything that is a legitimate 404 but is still coming up as a Soft 404, you should make sure your backend is serving the 404 response code properly or not as there may be an issue there. Other legitimate 404s that are serving the proper 404 reponse (not soft 404) are fine and can be marked fixed.

For those "Not Found" previous listing, you need to determine what (if anything) should be 301'd to an existing page so as to not lose link equity and then determine what is gone forever to serve a 410 response on (or leave them as 404s and they'll drop off eventually).

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

See the date when those errors were discovered in Search console. If they are recent, it means that the missing pages are indeed crawled and return 404, which is not good, however you look at it. So, yes, i'd recommend to redirect those to existing pages. Usually crawl errors don't have direct effect on rankings, but it's always nice to fix them. So, if you are sure that all of those 404s are "fixed" now or not supposed to be there, spend an hour fixing the top priority ones, don't die over it.

Hope this helps.