Increase in Soft 404s due to Custom 404 page?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

We have noticed recently soft 404s are increasing day by day; which are landing on our custom 404 page created a month back.

Other 404 pages are NOT landing on custom 404 page. Does this custom 404 page hurting us by causing an increase in soft 404s?

Our CMS is WordPress.

Thanks

[evolvingSEO]

Hello!

You should check the actual status code of your custom 404 page - does it actually return a 404 Not Found?

You can check in a variety of places:

• https://urivalet.com/
• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch

Or install the Redirect Path plugin and it will show the status code in your browser.