Soft 404 in Search Console
-
Search console is showing quite a lot of soft 404 pages on my site, but when I click on the links, the pages are all there. Is there a reason for this?
It's a pretty big site - I'm getting 141 soft 404s from about 20,000 pages
-
Hi Ikkie
That's great & very helpful - many thanks
-
HI
this could be potenailly your server. When you server returns the response code 200 on those pages.Soft 404s can limit a site’s crawl coverage by search engines because these duplicate URLs may be crawled instead of pages with unique content.” Google added tips for 404 pages
Here you can get complete guide for this issue: http://searchengineland.com/google-webmaster-tools-adds-soft-404-pages-43748
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
-
Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page
Hi everyone, I run a website in the travel industry where most users land on a location page (e.g. domain.com/product/location, before performing a search by selecting dates and times. This then takes them to a pre filtered dynamic search results page with options for their selected location on a separate URL (e.g. /book/results). The /book/results page can only be accessed on our website by performing a search, and URL's with search parameters from this page have never been indexed in the past. We work with some large partners who use our booking engine who have recently started linking to these pre filtered search results pages. This is not being done on a large scale and at present we only have a couple of hundred of these search results pages indexed. I could easily add a noindex or self-referencing canonical tag to the /book/results page to remove them, however it’s been suggested that adding a dynamic canonical tag to our pre filtered results pages pointing to the location page (based on the location information in the query string) could be beneficial for the SEO of our location pages. This makes sense as the partner websites that link to our /book/results page are very high authority and any way that this could be passed to our location pages (which are our most important in terms of rankings) sounds good, however I have a couple of concerns. • Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative? • Whilst all the content that appears on the pre filtered /book/results page is present on the static location page where the search initiates and which the canonical tag would point to, it is presented differently and there is a lot more content on the static location page that isn’t present on the /book/results page. Is this likely to see the canonical tag being ignored / link equity not being passed as hoped, and are there greater risks to this that I should be worried about? I can’t find many examples of other sites where this has been implemented but the closest would probably be booking.com. https://www.booking.com/searchresults.it.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAEoggI46AdIM1gEaFCIAQGYARS4ARfIAQzYAQHoAQH4AQuIAgGoAgO4ArajrpcGwAIB0gIkYmUxYjNlZWMtYWQzMi00NWJmLTk5NTItNzY1MzljZTVhOTk02AIG4AIB&sid=d4030ebf4f04bb7ddcb2b04d1bade521&dest_id=-2601889&dest_type=city& Canonical points to https://www.booking.com/city/gb/london.it.html In our scenario however there is a greater difference between the content on both pages (and booking.com have a load of search results pages indexed which is not what we’re looking for) Would be great to get any feedback on this before I rule it out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | GAnalytics1 -
Spam URL'S in search results
We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing. The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Digital-Murph0 -
What should I do with all these 404 pages?
I have a website that Im currently working on that has been fairly dormant for a while and has just been given a face lift and brought back to life. I have some questions below about dealing with 404 pages. In Google WMT/search console there are reports of thousands of 404 pages going back some years. It says there are over 5k in total but I am only able to download 1k or so from WMT it seems. I ran a crawl test with Moz and the report it sent back only had a few hundred 404s in, why is that? Im not sure what to do with all the 404 pages also, I know that both Google and Moz recommend a mixture of leaving some as 404s and redirect others and Id like to know what the community here suggests. The 404s are a mix of the following: Blog posts and articles that have disappeared (some of these have good back-links too) Urls that look like they used to belong to users (the site used to have a forum) which where deleted when the forum was removed, some of them look like they were removed for spam reasons too eg /user/buy-cheap-meds-online and others like that Other urls like this /node/4455 (or some other random number) Im thinking I should permanently redirect the blog posts to the homepage or the blog but Im not sure what to do about all the others? Surely having so many 404s like this is hurting my crawl rate?
Technical SEO | | linklander0 -
404 crawl errors ending with your domain name??
Hello, I have a crawl test with numerous 404 errors ending with my domain name..? Not sure what the cause is. Plugins? Ecommerce? I use Wordpress if that could lead to an answer. Thanks for your time. K
Technical SEO | | Hydraulicgirl0 -
Local Google vs. default Google search
Hello Moz community, I have a question: what is the difference between a local version of Google vs. the default Google in regards to search results? I have a Mexican site that I'm trying to rank in www.google.com.mx, but my rankings are actually better if I check my keywords on www.google.com The domain is a .mx site, so wouldn't it make more sense that this page would rank higher on google.com.mx instead of the default Google site, which in theory would mean a "broader" scope? Also, what determines whether a user gets automatically directed to a local Google version vs. staying on the default one? Thanks for your valuable input!
Technical SEO | | EduardoRuiz0 -
Getting a link removed from brand search - please help!
Hello all you mozzers! Ive just come into work with an established company who have one major problem when you google "palicomp" the second link that comes up is to consumeractiongroup with a thread that has been damaging the business for over 2 years, this thread is absolutely not representative of the business today. Strangely stronger links in search have better authority but google has ranked this post as being highly relevant to the business, does anybody know of any strategies we can do to get this removed, we have contacted consumeractiongroup directly but they are not prepared to move it. Does anyone have any idea of removal ideas or what we can do its crippling our business, we cant work out as to why its ranking better! Chris
Technical SEO | | palicomp0 -
I have 404 errors but can't find where these links are?
The 4xx report had 0 errors, and then on the recent crawl it found over 200. They are all variations on real URLs e.g.: Real URL: http://www.bullseyeuk.com/10-up-deluxe-literature-holder.html 404 Error URL: http://www.bullseyeuk.com/10-up-deluxe-literature-holder.html �� None of them are linked to the root domain and I can't find where they are coming from. Any ideas? Thanks Jack
Technical SEO | | JackMurphy0 -
Authorship and picture in search results
Tim and Kris Hallbom at this site: nlpca(dot)com are authors of several books and many great articles, and they would like their picture to show up in their search results. Articlebase.com contacted us and called it authorship, and said that they could get our picture to begin showing up in appropriate google searches. But we don't want to go through Articlebase.com, how do we do this? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | BobGW0