Why the sudden increase in soft 404s?
-
I haven't made any changes to my site but in a week I am showing 30-40 soft 404s in Webmaster Tools. This just started happening in the last 2 weeks. When I click to go to the pages they are fine, and even fetch and render works fine on the pages.
-
They have stopped, with no changes to the site. I have no idea why. Thank you for the offer though.
-
Hi EcommerceSite!
Would love to help you figure this out - please PM the URL. Thanks!
-
It seems to have stopped with no changes to the site. I have no idea why.
-
Hi EcommerceSite,
Can't see an answer to your question so far, are you still having issues?
If you want to send me a pm with your url then I'll have a look at this for you.
Tom
-
I can send it in a message.
-
Hi EcommerceSite!
It really sounds like folks will need to check out your site, or at least have a lot more information, in order to give much more advice. Is that something you can share?
-
Loading times have stayed really stable.
There are no 404 errors in either tool.
Using the fetch as Googlebot tool the pages all work fine.
It doesn't make any sense.
-
Hi,
This can occur if Google's crawlers for some reason is not able to reach some of your pages. It could be related to some network issues, or temporary server issues. A few things to look at:
- Do you see any increased loading times for your pages?
- When looking at the page with firebug or chrome's inspector tools - do you see any 404 errors returned
- What result do you get if using the Fetch as Googlebot tool?
Hope this helps
Best regards,Anders
-
It'd be great if you can share what your site is so people can check it out and see if they can figure out what's going on. Thanks!
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
-
Will Reducing Number of Low Page Authority Page Increase Domain Authority?
Our commercial real estate site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) contains about 800 URLs. Since 2012 the domain authority has dropped from 35 to about 20. Ranking and traffic dropped significantly since then. The site has about 791 URLs. Many are set to noindex. A large percentage of these pages have a Moz page authority of only "1". It is puzzling that some pages that have similar content to "1" page rank pages rank much better, in some cases "15". If we remove or consolidate the poorly ranked pages will the overall page authority and ranking of the site improve? Would taking the following steps help?: 1. Remove or consolidate poorly ranking unnecessary URLs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Update content on poorly ranking URLs that are important?
3. Create internal text links (as opposed to links from menus) to critical pages? A MOZ crawl of our site's URLs is visible at the link below. I am wondering if the structure of the site is just not optimized for ranking and what can be done to improve it. THANKS. https://www.dropbox.com/s/oqchfqveelm1q11/CRAWL www.nyc-officespace-leader.com (1).csv?dl=0 Thanks,
Alan0 -
How to Handle a Soft 404 error to an admin page in WordPress
I'm seeing this error on Google Webmaster Console: | URL: | http://www.awlwildlife.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php | | | Error details | Linked from | | |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aj613
| Last crawled: 11/15/16First detected: 11/15/16 The target URL doesn't exist, but your server is not returning a 404 (file not found) error. Learn more Your server returns a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404). This creates a poor experience for searchers and search engines. More information about "soft 404" errors | Any ideas what I should do about it? Thanks!0 -
Why would my total number of indexed pages stop increasing?
I have an ecommerce marketplace that has new items added daily. In search consoloe my pages have always gone up almost every week. It hasn't increased in 5 weeks. We haven't made any changes to the site and the sitemap looks good. Any ideas on what I should look for?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Canonical Tags increased after putting the appropriate tag?
Hey, I noticed that the number of duplicate title tags increased from 14k to 30k in Google Search Console. These dup title tags derived from having the incorrect canonical tags. For instance, http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/?d=Mens
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul562
http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/?d=Womens These two are the same exact pages with two parameters (These are not unisex by the way). Anyway, when I viewed the page source, it had the parameter in the canonical tag so.... it would look like this So whether it be http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/
http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/?d=Mens
http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/?d=Womens The canonical tag had the "?d=Womens" I figured that wasn't best practices, so for the canonical tag I removed the parameter so now the canonical tag is http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/ for that specific page with parameter (if that makes sense). My question is, why did my number of errors doubled after what I thought fixed the solution?0 -
Sudden loss of half my Moz rankings
My Moz Pro report from Sunday shows I have lost ranking on about half of the 1000+ keyword phrases I track. Most of these drops are of the order of 50 places or more. But 6 went up and the rest stayed the same. I see no corresponding drop in Google search traffic or Google search impressions. So how do I read this? About a week ago I switched my travel website to a premium theme and removed indexing on my Wordpress attachment pages. In the week since, There is no manual penalty visible. The new theme increased my page speed from C to A, so I thought it would help my rankings. Now I don't know what to think. My website is http://www.asiantraveltips.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Sudden Drop in rank of Keyword "Sobha Aspirational Homes"
Hi, For domain http://www.homeadda-sobhaaspirationalhomes.in/ keyword Sobha Aspirational Homes, We had google india ranking 5 continuously for past 2 months. There is sudden drop in rank and we have been pushed to rank 114. I do not understand why this happened. Regards, Mithun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mithungowda0 -
Cannot Increase Ranking For a Keyword Phrase
I've been working on the keyword phrase, "Niceville Assisted Living" for the website: http://nicevilleassistedliving.com and my increase in rankings has pretty much stalled. When I first started working on this website, a lot of the content was duplicated (which we took care of by plugging in unique content), there were locations listed on the homepage that were throwing my rankings off, I've created blog posts each week (we've even tried posting one post every day for a week), added the Facebook feed to the homepage, corrected errors in the theme, and I'm trying to get a resources page built. I know content is a very, very large part of SEO.. but it seems like the content I am plugging in isn't helping. There aren't any errors in Webmaster Tools and my keyword density is fairly close to the website ranking #1. I think my biggest problem is backlinks. Other websites have quite a few whereas the website I'm working on doesn't have any (I'm working on that, but the number I have doesn't compare to the websites ranking in the top three). I'm stumped as to what to do next. Does anyone have suggestions to improve the ranking for this keyword phrase?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReviveMedia0 -
I am SEO amameur and have bee adding links slowly to site. I cannot seem to increase my domain authority from 20 however, Anyone any advice please????
I updated meta tags on website 2/3 months ago and saw a significant improvements in rankings for keyowrds, however since then I have been dropping back down. I am wondering if this is because of low domain authoriyty. it is currentyly 20. www.babskibay.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | babski0