Yesterday, the Google Webmaster Central blog announced that GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) is now reporting on soft 404s or soft 404 errors. As a reminder, a “soft 404″ occurs when a webserver responds with a 200 OK HTTP response code for a page that doesn’t exist rather than the appropriate 404 Not Found. According to Google,

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.

The web is infinite, but the time search engines spend crawling your site is limited. Properly reporting non-existent pages with a 404 or 410 response code can improve the crawl coverage of your site’s best content.

Soft 404 errors are not only a bad idea for the search engines, but they can confuse your site visitors as well. Returning a 404 response code for a non-existent URL is ideal as opposed to websites that serve “soft 404s” return a 200 response code.  It’s much better to return a 404 response code and clearly explain to users that the file wasn’t found. Google illustrates this very clearly with this post.

How to Fix Soft 404 Errors

1. Check whether you have soft 404s listed in Webmaster Tools
2. For the soft 404s, determine whether the URL:

1. Contains the correct content and properly returns a 200 response (not actually a soft 404)
2. Should 301 redirect to a more accurate URL
3. Doesn’t exist and should return a 404 or 410 response

3. Confirm that you’ve configured the proper HTTP Response by using Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools
4. If you now return 404s, you may want to customize your 404 page to aid your users. Our custom 404 widget can help.


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