GWT Soft 404 count is climbing. Important to fix?

[merch_zzounds]

In GWT I am seeing my mobile site's soft 404 count slowly rise from 5 two weeks ago to over 100 as of today.  If I do nothing I expect it will continue to rise into the thousands.  This is due to there being followed links on external sites to thousands of discontinued products we used to offer.  The landing page for these links simply says the product is no longer available and gives links to related areas of our site.

I know I can address this by returning a 404 for these pages, but doing so will cause these pages to be de-indexed.  Since these pages still have utility in redirecting people to related, available products, I want these pages to stay in the index and so I don't want to return a 404.

Another way of addressing this is to add more useful content to these pages so that Google no longer classifies them as soft 404.  I have images and written content for these pages that I'm not showing right now, but I could show if necessary.

But before investing any time in addressing these soft 404s, does anyone know the real consequences of not addressing them?  Right now I'm getting 275k pages indexed and historically crawl budget has not been an issue on my site, nor have I seen any anomalous crawl activity since the climb in soft 404s began.  Unchecked, the soft 404s could climb to 20,000ish.  I'm wondering if I should start expecting effects on the crawl, and also if domain authority takes a hit when there are that many soft 404s being reported.

Any information is appreciated.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

When you have these issues, you have options. For instance, if the product is never coming back, you could redirect the page to a relevant product or category, remove the page from your sitemap, and change internal links, or simply create a custom 404 page.

But, if the product is coming back and temporarily unavailable, you could create an out of stock message to let users know the product isn't available at the moment (and will be back) but there's a whole site to explore and check out other products. But again, you have to keep the user in mind with errors on your site.

You can read more about Domain Authority here - although it's not directly stated, I am sure having errors all over you site (especially almost 10% of it) could be bad for it - although it's not at the point right now.

I would start there - what products are legitimately gone? What ones are just out of stock? Can you redirect these to their categories? Are users landing on these pages a lot?

I would also take a look at your backlink profile in Majestic and see which links are worth correcting or removing.

This is upto you to prioritize these issues and remedy accordingly. Good luck!

[DirkC]

Hi,

Agree with Patrick. Some additional info & resources:

It's better to avoid 'soft 404's' - in fact Google prefers "real" 404 pages (which are are an ok strategy in case of a large number of out of stock products).
You could check this article with the different options according to Matt Cutts (http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2334932/ecommerce-seo-tips-for-unavailable-products-from-googles-matt-cutts

• Small site: show alternative products instead of 404
• Medium site: 404 is ok - best to have custom version
• Large site: consider using 'unavailable after' tag

Are soft 404's going to hurt your site: check this answer from Cyrus Shepard on a similar question (http://moz.com/community/q/soft-404s-for-unpublished-301-d-content#reply_291233

"How much will it hurt you? Probably not much, but it's hard to say.

Let's ask these questions:

• How much traffic goes to these pages? If not much, is it okay to 404 them?
• Are there more relevant pages you could redirect these to? (ideally, something with a similar title as the original page?)
• Have you seen much traffic loss overall? If not, it's likely this isn't hurting you."

Hope this helps

Dirk

[MoosaHemani]

I think I have to agree with Patrick. Whenever you have soft 404s on your website the best way to deal with them is to think about users and then about search engines.

Again as Patrick said, if the products are gone forever, redirect the pages to most relevant product and pass the link juice to other pages as well so that right kind of product started to get ranked. If the product are temporarily unavailable my advice is to show the product details, images with a tag about out of stock  and a popup may be that guide to other parts of the website.

Whatever you use, think about your users and if they are comfortable, just go with it and I am sure search engine will follow you accordingly as at the end of the day what search engine want is the happy user.

Will soft 404 hurt? In my opinion few soft 404s on the website should not hurt but again as you said it might grow in thousands, in that case this is can be a problem and can affect your SERP rankings.

Hope this helps!

[merch_zzounds]

Thank you for your responses!