Soft 404 errors

[jwdl]

Hello Everyone,

I recently removed some pages and made a custom 404 page by putting "ErrorDocument 404 http://www.site.com/404.htm" in the htaccess file but WMT now reports soft 404 errors, how do I do this properly?

Thanks

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Try going to the soft 404 errors that webmaster tools is reporting, and see the HTTP status code you're getting. If the status code being returned is a 200, you'll know you're getting a soft 404. You can check the status code with the moz bar, in the page analysis section, under the page attributes tab, if you scroll down to the bottom, you'll see the status code of the page.

You may also want to emend the file reference in your htaccess file to be relative and just do /404.htm, and not the full path - maybe that will help.

Mark