Soft 404s for unpublished & 301'd content
-
Hi,
One site I work with unpublished a lot of thin content. Great idea, right?
These unpublished pages were then 301'd up to the main category page that they previously existed in.
Now Google Webmaster Tools calls them out as soft 404 errors. This seems unexpected since the pages
were 301'd. Here is my question; Is this a serious problem that may affect the site's overall organic results
and if so what should I do about it?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Short answer: create a custom 404 page, not just for these pages, but one that can show for everypage on your site.
A few resources:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93641?hl=en
Example: http://moz.com/sadfklfadsadfjs
-
Cyrus, thanks for hanging in there with my questions. If I just give back a 404, what am I showing them on the page?
I would think seeing the main questions page would be better than just sitting at the original url and looking at 404 page notice - seems like a bad user experience if Google wants to get all user-experiency about it.
Thanks... Darcy
-
Yes, it's possible, but that could be considered cloaking. I'd say best to return a 404.
-
Hi Cyrus,
Have not experienced a dip, but things have been a little static.
Can you do both... forward the page and give back a 404?
What would you do?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Yes, I would think that at the point Google crawls it and finds it forwarded it would drop it from the index and not waste resources crawling it again unless linked somewhere. I will keep an eye out for links, but don't believe that there are any.
Thanks, Dirk... Darcy
-
In that case, sounds like you should either:
- 404 them if you have evidence these have hurt your rankings/traffic (have you experienced a dip?)
- Ignore them and go about your day
-
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for the info. These are forum pages where no one ever answered the question, so
there is no helpful info and very little content.
They were forwarded up to the main questions page (one / up the url structure).
The page they were forwarded to is like a questions category page, not specific to the subject of the
forwarded page. These forwarded pages don't get much/any traffic because they never ranked
and we didn't promote them.
If it doesn't hurt overall search on other pages, I'd rather not go to the substantial effort of finding subject-relevant pages to forward to, since no one will ever go to the original url and need to see something super relevant.
Your thoughts? Thanks! Best... Darcy
-
If Fetch like Google is also giving a 301 - I would mark them as solved in WMT & check if they re-appear.
If you click on the i next to the redirect message in Fetch like Google - it shows the type of redirect & the page it's redirecting to. I assume you checked that this is also a 301.I have a similar issue on one of my sites - if a user gets to a non-existing url - the server first tries to find out if the page exists - if it doesn't it's redirected to a 404 page. Although technically it is a 301 - WMT sees them as a soft 404 as the destination page is a "Page not found" type of page (called 404.php) - which (quite ironically) renders a 200 status.
On the destination page - do you mention somewhere a message like "page not found" or is it just a plain category page?
The SEO impact is difficult to assess - Google says these pages are mainly wasting the bot's time as it's indexing pages that do no longer exist, not sure if it is also affecting rankings. As you did the crawl with Screaming Frog, I guess you are also removing all internal links to these redirected pages? If these links disappear, and as the content was thin, I suspect you don't have many external links pointing to them, so the problem should disappear after a while.
rgds,
Dirk
-
If Google thinks the 301 leads to a page that isn't relevant enough, they may flag it as a "soft 404" even though it returns a 301. That's Google's way of saying they think you should 404 these pages instead.
How much will it hurt you? Probably not much, but it's hard to say.
Let's ask these questions:
- How much traffic goes to these pages? If not much, is it okay to 404 them?
- Are there more relevant pages you could redirect these to? (ideally, something with a similar title as the original page?)
- Have you seen much traffic loss overall? If not, it's likely this isn't hurting you.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
Okay, that is extra weird. It could be that GWT hasn't update your information since you made the changes. Since everywhere else is telling it's correct -- especially the fetch tool -- then you should wait a few more days and see if it updates.
-
Hi Erica,
I'm saying that the only place it shows a soft 404 is in GWT errors. Screaming Frog, web-sniffer and now Fetch As Google In GWT, all show them as 301 re-directs. I can't re-direct them more than they are. So, is GWT just goofy?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Hi Darcy,
Yeah, if it's still showing as a soft 404, there's still something wrong. I'd try using fetch and render as Google bot and see what happens.
Best of luck!
-
Hi Dirk,
Thanks for the suggestion. As noted above, I put the whole list thru screaming frog and a few thru your suggestion of web-sniffer.net.
95% of the whole list is 301s and 100% of the few put one at a time thru web-sniffer come back as 301s.
My question remains "Is this a serious problem that may affect the site's overall organic results
and if so what should I do about it?"
Thanks... Darcy
-
Hi Erica,
I put the list through screaming frog and 95% of the urls are shown as 301s.
Do you think screaming frog has it right or is there something they wouldn't catch?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Maybe an obvious question but did you check that the url's are indeed properly redirected - checking them with 'Fetch like Google' in WMT or by using a tool like web-sniffer.net?
rgds,
Dirk
-
I'd check to make sure your 301s were done correctly. If they are showing up as soft 404s, they are probably implemented wrong.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site still indexed after request 'change of address' search console
Hello, A couple of weeks ago we requested a change of address in Search console. The new, correct url is already indexed. Yet when we search the old url (with site:www.) we find that the old url is still indexed. Is there another way to remove old urls?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversal0 -
How necessary is it to disavow links in 2017? Doesn't Google's algorithm take care of determining what it will count or not?
Hi All, So this is a obvious question now. We can see sudden fall or rise of rankings; heavy fluctuations. New backlinks are contributing enough. Google claims it'll take care of any low quality backlinks without passing pagerank to website. Other end we can many scenarios where websites improved ranking and out of penalty using disavow tool. Google's statement and Disavow tool, both are opposite concepts. So when some unknown low quality backlinks are pointing and been increasing to a website? What's the ideal measure to be taken?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
No content using Fetch
Wooah, this one makes me feel a bit nervous. The cache version of the site homepage shows all the text, but I understand that is the html code constructed by the browser. So I get that. If I Google some of the content it is there in the index and the cache version is yesterday. If I Fetch and Render in GWT then none of the content is available in the preview - neither Googlebot or visitor view. The whole preview is just the menu, a holding image for a video and a tag line for it. There are no reports of blocked resources apart from a Wistia URL. How can I decipher what is blocking Google if it does not report any problems? The CSS is visible for reference to, for example, <section class="text-within-lines big-text narrow"> class="data"> some content... Ranking is a real issue, in part by a poorly functioning main menu. But i'm really concerned with what is happening with the render.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Soft 404 error for a big, longstanding 301-redirected page
Hi everyone, Years ago, we acquired a website that had essentially 2 prominent homepages - one was like example.com and the other like example.com/htm... They served the same purpose basically, and were both very powerful, like PR7 and often had double listings for important search phrases in Google. Both pages had amassed considerable powerful links to them. About 4 years ago, we decided to 301 redirect the example.com/htm page to our homepage to clean up the user experience on our site and also, we hoped, to make one even stronger page in serps, rather than two less strong pages. Suddenly, in the past couple weeks, this example.com/htm 301-ed page started appearing in our Google Search Console as a soft 404 error. We've never had a soft 404 error before now. I tried marking this as resolved, to see if the error would return or if it was just some kind of temporary blip. The error did return. So my questions are:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R
1. Why would this be happening after all this time?
2. Is this soft 404 error a signal from Google that we are no longer getting any benefit from link juice funneled to our existing homepage through the example.com/htm 301 redirect? The example.com/htm page still has considerable (albeit old) links pointing to it across the web. We're trying to make sense of this soft 404 observation and any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Eric0 -
Effect SERP's internal 301 redirects?
I'm considering installing Wordpress for my website. So I have to change the static URL's from /webpage.html to /webpage/. Yet I don't want to lose in the SERP's. What should I expect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellnesswooz1 -
Where's all the text?
Hi, We recently (yesterday) had a developer make a new site for us on Wix http://www.appointeddhq.com/ as the one we were planning to put up had a few teething issues (the beackend booking system wasn't ready and we needed something up immediately for a TV show we were being featured in). Having now had the chance to look through it, I'm not quite sure what's going on. None of the text appears to be there on any page, I can't find any of the descriptions we gave the developer, the alt tags behind pictures (and even the pics themselves) don't appear to be there, the URLs are messed up, titles are incorrect and there are no title tags to be found. Am I misunderstanding or is the whole site built in java? Obviously, this is quite a huge issue and I'll want to get it sorted immediately, but I thought it best to see what the good folks here though. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeahHutcheon0 -
301 redirect for duplicate content
Hey, I have just started working on a site which is a video based city guide, with promotional videos for restaurants, bars, activities,etc. The first thing that I have noticed is that every video on the site has two possible urls:- http://www.domain.com/venue.php?url=rosemarino
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino I know that I can write a .htaccess line to redirect one to the other:- redirect 301 /venue.php?url=rosemarino http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino but this would involve creating a .htaccess line for every video on the site and new videos that get added may get missed. Does anyone know a way of creating a rule to rewrite these urls? Any help would be most gratefully received. Thanks. Ade.0 -
I'm facinated by SEO but the truth is, I don't have the time to do it. Who can I hire?
I'm facinated by SEO but the truth is, I don't have the time to do it. I trust the moz community more than some of those other SEO forums out there so I'm asking you all, where can I go to find a good SEO firm who's affordable enough for a small startup? The next part of the question is, what should I expect to pay for services that will really make a difference? Please don't spam this thread....I seriously just want an honest opinion as to where I can find some credible help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chaz880