What is the difference between 404 Not Found and soft 404 errors?
404 NOT FOUND MEAN CODE
The status code is included in the page header and It’s only visible to the crawlers and not to the users.įor a complete list of all HTTP status codes, read this guide. The HTTP response code is a 3-digit number that tells search engines if the page is valid (code 200), not found (404/410) or moved (301). If you are confused on what are HTTP status codes and what is their role, all you have to know is that it’s a way to help crawlers understand whether their request to fetch a page was a success, failure or something else.Įvery time a webpage is accessed by a search engine crawler, the first thing that they check is the HTTP status code. Search engines instead of spending time crawling your important pages, spend time crawling and indexing soft 404 pages. You don’t want users to click on a link from search engine results and land on a page on your website that has no or little content and with no value to the user. In the case of missing, invalid or non-existent pages it should either return a 404/410 (not found), or a 301 (moved) and not a 200 (success code). It is important to find and fix soft 404 errors because:Ī page should return the correct HTTP status code. What is important to fix soft 404 errors? Google falsely marks a page as ‘seems to be a 404’ while there is nothing wrong with the page. When Google tries to crawl the page some of the page resources (CSS, JS) cannot be loaded and as a result, the page comes with no content and this makes Google think that it should be a 404. There is a temporary issue with crawling. An example of this is empty tag pages that display no content. This makes Google think that the page should return a 404/410 code and not a 200 OK code. You have pages with no or little content.
Let’s see what are the most common causes of soft 404 errors.
In simple words, this means that while a page is invalid, instead of giving search engines the correct error code so that they ignore it, your server returns a 200 OK code, which tells them that the page is valid.Īs a result, search engines keep crawling these pages and list them in the search results. What is a soft 404 error?Ī soft 404 error occurs when a page requested by the user cannot be found or is invalid and the server instead of returning the correct HTTP error code (404 or 410 not found), it returns an HTTP status code 200 OK (success). So, when you log in to your Google search console and see Soft 404 errors or Submitted URL Seems to be a soft 404 errors, read on to find out what this means and how you can fix them. What is the difference between 404 Not Found and soft 404 errors?.
404 NOT FOUND MEAN HOW TO
In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about soft 404 errors including what they are, how to find them and how to fix them. Soft 404 errors can be very confusing because in many cases it’s not clear what the issue is and this makes troubleshooting and fixing a cumbersome process. One of the steps of technical SEO is to find and fix soft 404 errors.
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