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Does 404 errors affect SEO?
404 error pages don’t really hurt your SEO, but there’s definitely a lot you can miss out if you don’t fix them. If you have backlinks pointing to pages on your website that return a 404, try to fix those backlinks and 301 redirect your broken URLs to relevant location.
What is the difference between 404 Not Found and soft 404 errors?
A 404 error happens when a page is not available and the server sends the correct HTTP status code — a 404 Not Found — to the browser telling the page is nowhere to be found. A soft 404 error happens when the server sends a 200 OK status for the requested page, but Google thinks that the page should return a 404.
What do I do with a soft 404 error?
What causes soft 404 errors and how to fix them?
- Fix: make sure to return this status code instead of a 200 OK .
- Fix: update the redirect so it points to the most relevant alternative.
- Fix: if these pages shouldn’t exist, 404 them.
- Fix: adjust the page’s content so it’s not mistaken for a 404 page.
Why are there so many soft 404s on Google?
Soft 404s are problematic because search engines will continue to crawl and index pages that don’t exist when that time could be better spent crawling pages that do exist. You can find a list URLs Google suspects to be soft 404 pages in Google Search Console under Coverage > Errors.
What does a 404 error mean on a website?
A true 404 error message occurs when a website’s server returns an HTTP 404 standard response code to indicate that it couldn’t find the webpage (URL) that was requested by the user. This informs both browsers and search engines that the page doesn’t exist.
What happens when a soft 404 is returned?
When a soft 404 error is returned the page is still crawled and indexed. If your website returns an HTTP status code other than a 404 ( or 410) for a non-existent page, it can negatively impact the website’s performance in organic search. This means that if your website has a high proportion of soft 404 errors, it can be harmful.
Where can I find list of soft 404 pages?
You can find a list URLs Google suspects to be soft 404 pages in Google Search Console under Coverage > Errors. You can also perform a crawl in Screaming Frog, filter by pages that return a 200 status code, and then sort by word count by ascending order.