Where does Google finds "Soft 404" and "Not found" links?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

We can see very old links or anonymous links of website suddenly listing under soft 404 or 404 in GSW. As per Google, some of them are some script generated ignorable links. Other are actually the ones which were deleted but not redirected. I wonder how Google get these years old links even though there are no source links available for these. These must be fixed even though they are not linked anywhere from our internal or external pages?

Thanks

[vtmoz]

Hi Andrew,

I have sent you the example URL in PM as I would like to maintain privacy about our domain. Please check the URL and give the suggestions.

Thanks

[Andrew-SEO]

A soft 404 means that a URL on your site returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist and also a 200-level (success) code to the browser. Can I heave an example URL??

[vtmoz]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the response. I agree with you. But do you have any idea why it turns soft 404?

[Andrew-SEO]

Once google indexes pages it checks for the page from their own index. So the links may exist in googles database rather than being a link on your site or someone elses site.

When google checks for these pages: is your website responding with a 404? Or is your website presenting a 200 for some reason.

Maybe in the absence of the page your content management system is presenting a duplicate of a page further up the hierarchy? for example

Google needs to have a 404 response a few times before it will disappear from search console.