What are Soft 404's and are they a problem

[Aikijeff]

Hi,

I have some old pages that were coming up in google WMT as a 404.  These had links into them so i thought i'd do a 301 back to either the home page or to a relevant category or page.

However these are now listed in WMT as soft 404's.

I'm not sure what this means and whether google is saying it doesn't like this?

Any advice welcomed.

[GPainter]

Hi Jeff,

I'll take a snippit from the webmaster tools

"In addition to returning a 404 code in response to a request for a page that doesn’t exist, the server will also display a 404 page. This may be a standard "File Not Found" message, or it could be a custom page designed to provide the user with additional information. The content of the page is entirely unrelated to the HTTP response returned by the server. Just because a page displays a 404 File Not Found message doesn’t mean that it’s a 404 page. It's like a giraffe wearing a name tag that says "dog." Just because it says it's a dog, doesn't mean it's actually a dog. Similarly, just because a page says 404, doesn't mean it's returning a 404. You can use Fetch as Google (or other tools available on the web) to verify whether the URL is actually returning the correct code."

and to help here is another link

http://forums.seochat.com/search-engine-optimization-28/diff-between-404-soft-404-error-467526.html

"The error 404 "page not found" means that the page you are finding server can't find he page.
Soft 404 means page not found and user will move to either home page or custom page."

Hope it helps.

[Davinia22]

Hi Jeff,

I had the same issue with a client last year. In a nut shell a soft 404 error is when the page looks like a regular 404 error web page but the http response header returns 200 OK. So search engines think that the page is okay (a regular webpage) but there is no content on that page etc.

Your webteam will need to identify how they are producing the soft 404 error pages (with 200OK header responses) and change that set-up in the CMS. Or, if these are old pages that are no longer required and are no longer driving traffic then archive/delete them.

Good luck,
Davinia