Google Search Console is a great tool to help you monitor your site and give you instructions on what to improve and what to fix. Soft 404 error is one of the errors that you need to fix because it is not friendly to users or search engines.
What is a soft 404 error?
A soft 404 error is a crawl error you get from Google Search Console when users quest a URL that does not exist on your website but your server does not return a 404 code. When a user visits a does-not-exist page on your site, your server should return a 404 error (not found).
Usually, when a visitor requests a page on your site that doesn’t exist, a web server returns a 404 (not found) error. This HTTP response code clearly tells both browsers and search engines that the page doesn’t exist. As a result, the content of the page (if any) won’t be crawled or indexed by search engines.
A soft 404 occurs when your server returns a real page for a URL that doesn’t actually exist on your site. This usually happens when your server handles faulty or non-existent URLs as “OK,” and redirects the user to a valid page like the home page or a “custom” 404 page.
This is a problem because search engines might spend much of their time crawling and indexing non-existent, often duplicative URLs on your site. This can negatively impact your site’s crawl coverage because your real, unique URLs might not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently due to the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages.
How does soft 404 affect SEO?
For a medium or large website, there probably have a few incorrect links pointing to site or some URL does not exist anymore. If you redirect users and bots to your home page or custom 404 page, then Googlebot does not this is a non-exist page.
Search engine bots will still crawl these wrong URLs. As you know, your crawl budget is limited. If Google sends too many bots to the wrong pages, the correct pages that you want Google to crawl may not get that much attention from Google.
In other words, redirecting users to your home page or other pages provide the bad user experience. When users get a not-found error or see the content they do not want, they may want to check whether they mistakenly enter the URL.
If redirected, the URL will change. Some users may think they have been redirected to some Ads sites. I do not know you, but when I first click a link on some website, it pops up an advertisement. I need to click the second time to open the link.
Therefore, you should not redirect 404 to the homepage. For the deleted pages, you should redirect to the page that has similar content or serves a 404 response code. You can use 404 checker to if your server does respond a 404 code.
How to fix soft 404 errors?
If you intentionally redirect 404 to the homepage, then you know how to fix it. Otherwise, the most likely cause is that you are redirecting the user to a valid location instead of serving a 404 code and displaying your custom 404 page.
You probably set the .htaccess file like this: “ErrorDocument 404 http://www.domain.com/404.html”. this will redirect the not-exist URL to the 404 page, but not respond a 404 code. What you should do is use a relative path like this: “ErrorDocument 404 /404.html”. This will simply respond a 404 code and serve the 404 error page.
With a 404 response code, web spiders and web crawlers will know that this is an error page and not crawl this URL as a normal page. You will still see hard 404 error, but search engine understands this is an error so it will not affect your rankings.
How to create a perfect custom 404 page?
- The navigation should be the same as the rest of the site. Firstly this makes it clear that you have not accidentally left the site, and secondly, it means that users who are familiar with the site can find their favorite sections quickly and easily.
- The statement should be clear. Something like “Hmm, the page you’re looking for can’t be found” is good enough.
- Leave entries to your most popular content.
- The search box should be prominent on the page. Visitors come to your 404 page because they cannot find the content they are looking for. Therefore, your 404 page’s first mission is to help them quickly find it. What’s better than a search box to find stuff.
