Things You Need To Know About Soft 404-Error

While working on your site, you may have been notified by Google Search Console about the presence of a soft 404-error on your site. You may wonder what these errors are. You may also wonder about the word ‘soft’ in these errors. Why do these errors happen and what can you do about it? This is what we are going to talk about in this article.

What is a soft-404 error?

Basically, a soft 404-error is a confusing error. A few things that you need to know about these errors are worth mentioning in this regard.

• A 404-error occurs when a page is not available online and server sends a message “404 Not Found” to the browser. This message means that he page is nowhere to be found.
• In case of a soft 404-error, server returns a “200 OK” status against the requested page. However, Google thinks that the page should return a 404. It can happen when the page content looks like an error or there is no content at all.

So, you can say that pages with soft 404-error are the ones which should not exist but they still exist in the CMS. That’s surely confusing. The soft 404-errors are not standard server status codes. However, these actually the labels which search engines add to the pages in order to make a sense of their existence. These errors can be seen through the tools like Google Search Console. And so, there is always a way you can fix these errors.

Now, you may wonder when these errors occur. The matter of fact is that they happen quite a lot of times. They can also show in the CMSs like Wordpress. You may be able to find some empty and useless pages on Wordpress. These are the pages that return a soft 404-error.

Finding and fixing these errors

First, you need to understand the fact that these errors can be quite harmful for the SEO. Search engines do not like to pay attention to the dead links. These dead links represent poor maintenance of the site.

You can find about these pages in the Google Search Console’s Coverage report. The error marked as ‘Submitted URL seems to be a Soft 404’ can be clicked on to have an overview of the page.

Fixing this page depends upon what you want to do with this page. A few options are worth mentioning in this regard.

• If a page doesn’t exist anymore and its link returns a soft 404-error, you need to give it the status of 404 (not found) or 410 (content deleted). However, you have to keep it in mind that having too many 404s on your site can hurt the website’s SEO.
• If your page is available but it still gives a soft 404-error, it may be due to Google not liking the thin content. You can fix this error by adding high quality content in the page.
• If the page has been moved to a new location, you need to give it a 301-redirect.

Remember, maintaining the site is always important. Regular and timely maintenance of the site can actually help you avoid all these errors on your site.

Things You Need To Know About Image SEO

Whether you are a blogger writing for an online blog or a newspaper, chances are you are going to find yourself in a position wondering if the blog post or article you are writing needs an image. Well, the answer of this question is always a ‘YES’. With the help of an image, you will not only be able to attract your viewers to the content you are writing but you will also be able to have SEO advantage.

In this article, we are going to discuss how images can help in the SEO of your blogs.

Always add images

You may have heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. You may have written high quality content for your blog but you are always going to need to explain it with the help of pictures. A simple image related to your article will tell the viewers what your article is about. And if you add a flow chart or diagram, you will be able to elaborate things in better way.

Another reason you need to add images to the blog posts is that visual search is getting more important. People also search images to find the information. This is where the SEO of images get really important. It means that optimizing images on your blogs can help you get better and bigger traffic to your website.

A brand new interface was introduced in the Google Images quite recently. This interface used several filters which could help in the searching of images from different perspectives. Moreover, the new interface allowed users to see Meta data and even attribution. With these features, it becomes evident that Google is paying attention to making the images more valuable for the searchers.

Finding the right image

The best images are the original ones, i.e. the ones taken by you. Stock photos are not always ideal in this regard. You have to make sure that the image you have selected is relevant to your article. It needs to reflect the subject of your post. If you want to rank an image in Google, make sure that you have placed it in the top area of the post.

Instead of using stock photos, you can consider using other sources if you do not have your own original images. For this purpose, you can download images from Flickr which is a huge source of images available on the web.

SEO of your images

When it comes to SEO of your images, there are a few things that you are going to have to take into consideration. For instance, you will need to make sure that the images load faster when the pages load.  Reducing the size of the image is one of the options that you can consider. There are Wordpress plugins which can help you in optimizing the size of images. Moreover, you will need to use responsive images to make them fit in every screen size.

If you have worked with Wordpress, you may already have an idea about alt text and title text. These attributes can help you make the image searchable in Google. That’s where you can increase the traffic on your website.