Can soft 404's hurt my rankings?

[cbielich]

This post mainly pertains to soft 404's but I recently dropped a few ranks in my main keyword which I have maintained prior to this my better rank for well over 2 years. I participate in NO BLACKHAT and obtain links naturally. I want to describe a few issues that happened prior to my ranking dropping and see what you guys think.

I started to receive about a week prior to my ranks dropping DNS issues with GWT. It was weird because when I would use Goole Fetch on those pages they would return just fine so I was not sure what was happening there.

I use Google page speed server which did in fact decrease my load time (YEAH!!) so that was cool. About 1 week prior to my rankings dropping I enabled godaddy's Website Accelerator as well thinking that could help even more. Because of this I thought maybe this had something to do with my DNS issues with Google so I decided to turn off my website accelerator with Godaddy and just leave my Google pagespeed service on. I figure I don't need 2 of them anyways IMO.

Also at the same time I started to receive a ton (31,000+) html errors with duplicate metadescriptions and titles. I discovered I had an error with my code which was displaying 2 different sets of descriptions and titles for each of these pages. I since then have fixed the issue and waiting for Google to index those pages.

Here is were I think I might have been hurting from the drop in rankings. Some months ago (maybe 2) I decided to redirect my 404's to my homepage. Yes I know this is not good now and I have created a proper 404 page which returns the 404 code. I recently started getting a ton of Soft 404 errors in GWT which is what brought my attention to this issue.

My question is, could my action of redirecting my users to my homepage as a 404 which obviously was returning a 200 on a page that did not exist be possibly the culprit to my ranks dropping?

[KenyonManu3-SEOSEM]

Quick response- yes a large portion of soft 404's is not going to make google happy. It can be confusing to users and google knows that so they don't like it for pages high in their results.

the real question is not can soft 404's hurt, it is was it the soft 404's or the duplicate content issue on a grand scale. I would be most worried about the dup titles on that large of a scale.

My opinion yea soft 404's can hurt you, but probably not as much as 31k in duplicate titles.

sounds like you addressed both issues, nothing to do but fetch as google submit w links and wait  for the indexing to happen.

Good luck

[KenyonManu3-SEOSEM]

I forgot to add this reference about the 404's

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/farewell-to-soft-404s.html

[cbielich]

Thanks very helpful article, and BTW AWESOME AVATAR