Soft 404's versus hard 404's

[PrintEZ]

This post is deleted!

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Morris,

A soft 404 is basically exactly what you have with your current setup, it is a page not found that is returning a 200 header response (or any other header that doesnt match the intent of the page which is actually a 404 page not found). It is problematic for a number of reasons, mainly that google can and will index and crawl the page and that it makes it pretty difficult to use tools to identify your real 404 issues when the headers are not declaring that the page is in fact a 404 not found!

So yes, you need to get rid of that 200 response header and replace it with a proper 404 header. Luckily this is usually a pretty easy fix for developers, details of which depend a bit on how your system is setup but it shouldn't be difficult.

Hope that helps!

[Branagan]

You should try to avoid soft 404s since they are confusing for users as well as for search engines. A good solution is to use custom 404 pages, that way you can return the correct code to the bots and provide some useful content for your users. Also, you should try to redirect some of those 404s to pages with related content in your website, check for the ones that carry the most link juice, traffic, etc.

Read on:

• Soft 404 errors
• Farewell to soft 404s
• Creating useful 404 pages
• Customizing your 404 page
• HTTP Status Codes Best Practices