Introduction

The so-called soft 404 error has become a buzzword in the industry of SEO these days, however, what does it imply to your site? It is possible that pages that are returning a bad status or offer a poor user experience can be damaging to crawl-efficiency and search visibility. This tutorial goes into in-depth detail on what a soft 404 error is, why it is relevant, and how to locate it and most importantly how to fix it. Knowing this, you will be in a better position to maintain the healthiness of your website and make it crawl-friendly.

Understanding Soft 404 Errors

What is a "soft 404 error"?

A soft 404 error happens when a page is shown to be missing (or has insignificant/no useful information) and the server replies with the 200 OK status code rather than the appropriate 404 Not Found (or 410 Gone) status code. 
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Effectively: the page still exists on the side of the server but on the side of the user or search-engine it is essentially non-existent or useless.

H3: Soft 404 vs. Regular 404 What the difference?

An ordinary 404 occurs when there is a request to a page that does not exist and the server responds by giving a correct 404 status code. 
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A soft 404 occurs when the page is unavailable, immaterial or thin, but the server responds to the request with 200 OK instead of 404. The mismatch is recognized by search engines and it is marked as a soft 404. 
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In brief normal 404: server response is not found; soft 404: server response is good, but content is missing or not applicable.

Why do soft 404 errors occur?

It has several causes in common:

Thin pages, or pages with irrelevant content (e.g. category pages in e-commerce sites which have no products on them). 
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Deleted/moved pages still result in 200 OK being issued by the server (possibly redirecting to home page or giving a no results page). 
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CMS or plug in based pages that automatically create empty archives, tags, categories, or search-result pages. 
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Mis-configuration of server: the error pages were served as status 200 and not 404/410. 
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How do soft 404 errors affect SEO and user experience?

Soft 404s can be considered harmless, though they do pose real dangers:

Wasted crawl budget: Search engines waste time crawling pages that are of no usefulness at all and decrease crawl frequency on valuable pages. 
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User experience: When you arrive at a page with a message that there is nothing found, or minimal content, the user experience are poor, leading to bouncing and decreased time-on-site, which are both negative factors that unhelpful in SEO. 
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Indexing problems: Pages that are considered to be soft 404s can be omitted or assigned a lower priority. 
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How to Identify Soft 404 Errors

Check in Google search engine.

Filter using the Coverage Report - filter by “Submitted URL appears to be Soft 404. 
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Steps:

Access Google search console.

Go to Coverage - click the error type soft 404.

Review affected URLs.

Click on each URL and check the URL Inspection tool to view the crawling status.

Manual checks and crawl-tools.

Scan pages with status 200, but with no content or small content using such tools as Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Ahrefs. 
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Go through pages of suspected sites by hand: The issue here is to pose yourself, does this page contain the content or service that it promises? If not, it may be a soft 404. 
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 Rapid question check.

- What is the meaning of the Google reply of Submitted URL appears to be a Soft 404?

Since Google indexed the URL, it returned status 200 OK but determined the content to be missing, irrelevant or too thin. 
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- Do soft 404 error reduce my ranking?

They will not always lead to a direct punishment but the collateral consequences such as less crawling and lack of indexing can be detrimental to visibility. 
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How to Fix Soft 404 Errors

Step-by-step How-to (in each scenario)

If the page is truly gone

Configure the server to respond with a correct 404 Not Found status code or a 410 Gone status code. 
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Display a specific 404 web page pointing users to other content.

If the page moved to a new URL

Use a 301 redirect between the old and the new URL, and retain the value of the link. 
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In case the page is valid and contains thin/low value content.

Enhance the substantive content, value added, pictures, videos, infographics. 
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Once the improvements are done, re-index Search Console.

Not interested in the page on search results.

Add a noindex tag or disallow it by robots.txt, especially adding to the archive/search result page with no content. 
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Best practices & tips

The server should always respond with the appropriate HTTP status code - it is easy to confuse with mis-code. 
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Do not redirect most of your pages that are gone to the home page - most of the time, this results in soft 404. 
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Check the crawl budget of the site and maintain indexable content to be up to date and significant.

Create a convenient custom 404 page to enhance user experience and decrease bouncing.

Prevention & Maintenance

Proactive measures

Periodically review your site looking at pages that contain little or no content (empty category pages, tag pages, search results) and delete them or no index them. 
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Check the status of server responses and make sure that your CMS/theme does not default to blank pages with status 200.

Check with crawl-tools every month to monitor newly-created soft 404s; correct them before they disseminate.

Optimize health in the long run.

Create alerts in Search console to alert you of new soft 404s.

Maintain a clean structure of your site: do not have millions of almost similar pages: this is a spur to soft 404 classification.

Make every page user oriented: when a page does not have a specific useful purpose, think of deleting or consolidating it.

Conclusion

Soft 404s can be viewed as little technical glitches, but they can negatively impact the SEO work of your site and the experience of users in ways that aren’t noticeable but add up to a significant effect. Knowing their nature, how to identify them, and how to resolve them, you will enhance the technical well-being of your site, as well as make search engines more certain in your content. Also, routine maintenance and active audits will contribute to you not falling into the soft 404 trap and make sure that your pages add value to your users, as well as crawlers. It may take minutes to fix every single error but the overall improvement to crawl performance, indexation and user experience is worthwhile.

Quick Question Answers

Q: What is the distinction between soft 404 and regular 404?

A default 404 gives out 404 Not Found status code whenever a page has not been found. A low 404 response sends back 200 OK even when the page is missing, thin or irrelevant, this baffles the users and the search engines. 
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Q: Should I solve soft 404 errors to boost my traffic on my site?

On the one hand, maybe slightly. Nonetheless, mending soft 404s can open up crawl-budget and can enhance indexing of quality pages - which may result in more visibility and visitation, in the long run. 
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Q: What should I do to address the problem with Submitted URL appears to be a Soft 404 in Search Console?

Check the URL in question: make decision whether page exists. In case, yes, enhance content and re-index. Otherwise, either send 404/410 or create 301 redirect. then watch till the condition is cleared.

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