Godaddy and Soft 404's

[AL123al]

Hello,

We've found that a website we manage has a list of not-found URLS in Google webmaster tools which are  "soft 404's " according to Google. I went to the hosting company GoDaddy to explain and to see what they could do. As far as I can see GoDaddy's server are responding with a 200 HTTP error code - meaning that the page exists and was served properly. They have sort of disowned this as their problem. Their server is not serving up a true 404 response. This is a WordPress site. 1) Has anyone seen this problem before with GoDaddy?Is it a GoDaddy problem?2) Do you know a way to sort this issue? When I use the command site:mydomain.co.uk the number of URLs indexed is about right except for 2 or 3 "soft URLs" . So I wonder why webmaster tools report so many yet I can't see them all in the index?

[AL123al]

We haven't tried the plug-in yet.  The pages not found route to a custom 404 page so we can see a 302 redirect to that and then the 200 because the custom page was displayed.  Per other forums we tried forcing the 404 return code prior to the page being loaded but this seems to be getting ignored or overwritten by GoDaddy.

I understand some people view the 200 as being correct as a page was loaded correctly but Google does ask for a 404 for a page not found.

[MattRoney]

Hi again, Al123al! Are you able to provide any info about your CMS? Or did the Redirection plugin recommendation take care of it? If so, please mark Dan's response as a Good Answer.

[badgergravling]

What CMS platform are you using? If you're on WordPress, for example, you can use the Redirection plugin to redirect any non-existing url to an existing relevant page.

Alternatively you can do the same with your .htaccess file.

[AL123al]

The URLS don't exist but I can't see a way of having them return a 404.

[MattRoney]

Hi AL123al! Did Dan's response help? We'd love an update.

[badgergravling]

1. I have a few sites on Godaddy and haven't seen anything unusual occurring for soft 404s.

2. It depends on the cause - are they a large percentage of the total indexed pages? By the sound of it they're only 2 or 3 from a total of how many?

The solution is usually to check why your pages aren't returning a proper 404 error code if they don't exist, or whether there is an issue with them being redirected somewhere.