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.