What Are Soft 404s and How to Fix Them
By Neil Patel
Have you ever landed on a webpage only to see a big error message serving as a dead end to your reading? As a user, you’re left with little direction and close the tab. As the website owner, that has bad news written all over it. While these pages serve a purpose, they can be harmful to your website if misused.
An example of a “page not found” error used in the wrong context is a soft 404 error. These can wreak havoc on your search engine rankings, website traffic, and even credibility.
Below, I’ll define what a soft 404 error is and cover the difference between regular (or hard) 404 errors. Then I’ll explain how to find these errors and resolve them.
What Are Soft 404 Errors?
Soft 404 errors are pages that return a “not found” error code (404), but the content on the page is not actually missing. The page may be empty, or it may contain partial content from other pages on the site. Soft 404s can be caused by misspellings in URLs, by outdated links, or by problems with the server.
When it’s a soft 404 error, the error is conveyed to website visitors but not to Google crawl bots. This means the pages continue to be crawled and indexed on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs.)
A soft 404 is not an official status; rather, it is one Google creates to alert you. This means Google and other search engines continue to crawl these web pages until you take action.
What Is the Difference Between (Hard) 404 and Soft 404 Errors?
The difference between hard 404 errors and soft 404 errors is the status they display to search engines.
With a hard 404 error, the 404 error code is returned to both page visitors and search engines. This tells both that the page doesn’t exist. Here’s an example of a hard 404 error from the clothing site ModCloth:
With a soft 404 error, the 404 error code is displayed to visitors but not search engines.
Instead, they’ll see a 200 OK status which gives them the green light to crawl. So if you’re seeing soft 404 errors in your Google Search Console, it means that there are pages on your site that may be returning 404 errors even though they actually exist.
Can Soft 404 Errors Impact My Site Ranking?
The short answer is yes; soft 404 errors can impact your website’s ranking on SERPs. To understand why, you need to understand how Google crawls a website.
To prevent strain on a website’s server and reduce the workload for the crawl bots, Google uses something called a crawl budget to determine how much and how often to crawl a site. A crawl budget is the number of pages that Googlebot will crawl on your site during each visit. The crawl budget is composed of crawl rate and crawl demand.
According to Google, the …read more
Source:: Kiss Metrics Blog
