Why the sudden increase in soft 404s?
-
I haven't made any changes to my site but in a week I am showing 30-40 soft 404s in Webmaster Tools. This just started happening in the last 2 weeks. When I click to go to the pages they are fine, and even fetch and render works fine on the pages.
-
They have stopped, with no changes to the site. I have no idea why. Thank you for the offer though.
-
Hi EcommerceSite!
Would love to help you figure this out - please PM the URL. Thanks!
-
It seems to have stopped with no changes to the site. I have no idea why.
-
Hi EcommerceSite,
Can't see an answer to your question so far, are you still having issues?
If you want to send me a pm with your url then I'll have a look at this for you.
Tom
-
I can send it in a message.
-
Hi EcommerceSite!
It really sounds like folks will need to check out your site, or at least have a lot more information, in order to give much more advice. Is that something you can share?
-
Loading times have stayed really stable.
There are no 404 errors in either tool.
Using the fetch as Googlebot tool the pages all work fine.
It doesn't make any sense.
-
Hi,
This can occur if Google's crawlers for some reason is not able to reach some of your pages. It could be related to some network issues, or temporary server issues. A few things to look at:
- Do you see any increased loading times for your pages?
- When looking at the page with firebug or chrome's inspector tools - do you see any 404 errors returned
- What result do you get if using the Fetch as Googlebot tool?
Hope this helps
Best regards,Anders
-
It'd be great if you can share what your site is so people can check it out and see if they can figure out what's going on. Thanks!
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
-
Sudden loss of half my Moz rankings
My Moz Pro report from Sunday shows I have lost ranking on about half of the 1000+ keyword phrases I track. Most of these drops are of the order of 50 places or more. But 6 went up and the rest stayed the same. I see no corresponding drop in Google search traffic or Google search impressions. So how do I read this? About a week ago I switched my travel website to a premium theme and removed indexing on my Wordpress attachment pages. In the week since, There is no manual penalty visible. The new theme increased my page speed from C to A, so I thought it would help my rankings. Now I don't know what to think. My website is http://www.asiantraveltips.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Should you increase the caching levels in Cloudfare to speed up the load times?
Caching Level Determine how much of your website's static content you want CloudFlare to cache. Increased caching can speed up page load time.Caching Level Ignore the query string of static content Site: http://www.southernwhitewater.com Determine how much of your website's static content you want CloudFlare to cache. Increased caching can speed up page load time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VelocityWebsites0 -
Will redirecting poor traffic web pages increase web presence
A number of pages on my site have low traffic metrics. I intend to redirect poor performing pages to the most appropriate page with high traffic. Example
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greyshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-redshoes all of the above will be redirected to the following page:
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes Question
Will carrying out htaccess redirects from the above example influence to web positioning of both www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes and www.sampledomomain.co.uk Regards Mark0 -
New Site Structure and 404s. Should I redirect everything?
Hi fellow Mozzers, I've recently re-released a site and also took the opportunity to change/clean up the URL structure. As a result of this Google is starting to report many 404s such as below; blog/tag/get-fit/ blog/tag/top-presents/ Most of these 404 errors are from tag or category pages which simply don't exist any more (because they were unnecessary, crap or irrelevant). Although there's also a few posts I've removed. My question is whether it's worth redirecting all these tags and pages to the root directory of the site's new blog (as there isn't really a new page which is similar or appropriate) or just to leave them as 404 errors. Bearing in mind; They don't really rank for anything There's little if any links pointing to these pages Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Home page sudden drop in rank, but not others.
Over the weekend, I noticed "www.thematstore.com" drop out of the search results for "chair mats", where previously it was between 10-12 ranked. The other pages on the domain have remained the same in regards to rankings for their intended keywords. The only thing I changed (on Nov 29th) is the title tag from "Chair Mats - Commercial Quality Chair Mats, Custom Made", to "Chair Mats - Best Custom Chair Mats, Commercial Quality". I know there is a lot that needs to be done on the site, and the site architecture is a bit of a mess (I recommended building a new site)... but I was hoping to gradually fix these issues without gambling with a rank drop. Not sure why the home page all of the sudden dropped out, any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Soft 404
Hey forum, My site is a Price Comparison site. Lately I've been getting some "Soft 404" errors with the Webmaster tool. I'll try to explain the steps causing it: 1. There's a valid link to a product 2. At some point the product is temporary out of stock or unavailable. 3. Google crawls this product page, getting a valid page with a message explaining this product is unavailable at this time. 4. Google see this page for few different products and (I assume) figures it's a none existing page and so it's a soft 404. The possible solutions I see are: 1. Return real 404, I'm not a fan of this solution, because these links will very likely be valid again when the product is back in stock. 2. Live with some "soft 404" errors in the webmaster tool. 3. Find another way to explain to Google that it's not a real 404. This sounds great but I'm not sure how this can be done. Any thoughts which would be the best method? Or maybe another solution I haven't thought of? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corwin0 -
Why is Google Reporting big increase in duplicate content after Canonicalization update?
Our web hosting company recently applied a update to our site that should have rectified Canonicalized URLs. Webmaster tools had been reporting duplicate content on pages that had a query string on the end. After the update there has been a massive jump in Webmaster tools reporting now over 800 pages of duplicate content, Up from about 100 prior to the update plus it reporting some very odd pages (see attached image) They claim they have implement Canonicalization in line with Google Panda & Penguin, but surely something is not right here and it's going to cause us a big problem with traffic. Can anyone shed any light on the situation??? Duplicate%20Content.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
How to increase rankings?
I know to increase rankings involves link building, but what kind of link building is worth it and what type is not? At the moment most of my link building effort is focused on guest blogging, which has worked well for me, I have seen some good movement on a range of keywords using this tactic but I cant help but think I could get a lot more movement in the serp's if I mixed it up a little. A few other link building techniques I know of are below, but I don't really use them, so my question is what ones should I be using combined with my guest blogging to give my rankings that little extra help. 1. Directory Submissions 2. Article Submissions 3. Press Release Distribution 4. Forum Signatures 5. Blog Comments 6. Social bookmarking 7. Social Sites (Squidoo, Weebly, Wordpress, blogger) If I have missed something please let me know. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0