If you’re a digital marketer or someone who looks after your company’s marketing materials, you’ve likely come across a few error codes along the way, some of which relate to your pages within your site. As such, Google Search Console might have alerted you that there was an issue with one of these pages — namely that it was returning a 404 soft error code. This is why it’s damaging to your visibility and could lead to you not ranking as highly as well as losing potentially 50% of organic traffic as a result of having this soft 404 on your site.
What is a soft 404 error?
When a Google search leads potential customers to one of your website’s pages, but that page isn’t found it’s called a soft 404 error. Soft 404 errors are often caused by inaccurate HTML code or an internal URL structure that doesn’t match the content delivered by the server.
Difference between a 404 and a soft 404 error
A 404 error is when a web page isn’t found. These are often issues on the user’s end, and there are a number of reasons why these may be occurring – from typos to broken links.
Pages that have a soft 404 error, or rather, a missing/not found status code problem don’t or shouldn’t exist but do. This problem can make it confusing for search engines because a soft 404 is not a usual status code and should generally be considered a misunderstanding by Google of what the page is trying to tell it.
Google and soft 404s
You can get really good information in Google Search Console regarding your website errors. You can use it to figure out which pages or even sections might be causing you issues once they go live on the web.
If traditional 404 pages return with a 200 OK status, they will have information indexed by search engines. This is not optimal, as soft 404 error pages will never be included in the indexes of search engines like Google.
WordPress themes can automatically generate pages that are useless and void of content. The situation is the same with many other CMSs.
Do soft 404 errors harm SEO?
Soft 404s are dead links that don’t work, and search engines despise this because they believe that if they are to rank a site higher/lower than others, then the site needs to be fully functional (all of its pages) as opposed to being broken. But this is really irrelevant because users expect soft 404s and understand that such things do happen on the web.
Even if your site seems new and shiny, if you have irrelevant pages that have no real value to users they’re not going to help you rank in search results. The crawl budget is a valuable thing. You want to make sure that you don’t spend more time going through pages than what’s needed. That means trying to keep errors low and tuning up your crawl efficiency.
How to find soft 404 errors
The easiest way to find the soft 404 errors on your site is by looking at your site on Google Search Console. In there you can view a coverage report which gives you an overview of all pages that have errors.
How to fix soft 404 errors
Fixing soft 404 errors depends on the page you need to fix and what you want the page to once fixed.
If you do have soft 404 errors, you should make sure the pages send out the correct status code. There are a few options available to you:
If this is a page that no longer exists, give it a 404 (not found) or 410 code (content deleted) and ensure your 404 page is good for users. Do remember that having lots of 404s on a site is bad practice as well.
If Google has given an available page a Soft 404, it means the search engine’s algorithms consider the page as having thin content and want the owner to make sure they have good, relevant content to their site. Show users and search engines that this specific page has value.
If this is a page that has a new URL, use a 301 Redirect to send users to the real page.
If you want to keep the page, but not have it in Google’s index, put a noindex tag onto it.
A possible cause of a soft 404 could be that it’s simply a case of bad links. If this is the case, it should not take more than a few moments to fix. Tools such as Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl can search through millions of pages very quickly and identify those broken links for you to fix.
Importance of site maintenance
Regularly checking for dead links and missing pages will prevent you from reaching out to users with a boring 404 error (predictable!) or poor search engine rankings due to your site’s inability to attract and engage customers. If this is something you constantly struggle with because troubleshooting isn’t your strong suit, you need technical SEO experts at Pure Marketing who can provide these services.
As part of our SEO package, we will regularly monitor your website to ensure that any issues with the code on your site are fixed to ensure your pages return the correct response code and you remain visible to users of search engines. Contact us today if you would like to find out more about the benefits of our search engine optimisation services.