Soft 404s are one of those things that you may come across every now and again. It’s a confusing error Google presents because it usually isn’t quite clear what it is or what you can do about it. Here, we will clarify what a soft 404 is, how it affects your rankings, and what you can do about them.

What is a soft 404?

A soft 404 is an error in which a web request returns a successful response code (200), but the search engine “thinks” it should be a 404.

How do you find a soft 404?

You can find soft 404s in Google Search Console’s Coverage tab under Index.

Why would a soft 404 occur?

There are a few reasons why you may be seeing a Soft 404.

• The page no longer exists and is redirecting to an irrelevant content page like the Home Page.
• The page has little or no content.
• There was an issue when the page was being crawled, and page resources (CSS, JS) can’t be loaded.
• Google incorrectly marks a page as “seems to be a 404”, despite nothing actually being wrong.

Will soft 404s affect my ranking?

Depending on why a soft 404 is happening, it could be wasting your crawl budget and can affect your website’s performance in organic search. If it is a previously existing page, it may end up in search results and provide a poor UX experience for users when they can no longer access it. Additionally, search engines may interpret your site as poor quality if it finds too many Soft 404s. This can also lead to your content crawl rate being reduced. However, if the pages showing as Soft 404s aren’t critical and not eating up your crawl budget, they aren’t urgent to fix.

How do you fix a soft 404?

The page is no longer available

There are two options you can take. The first is to make the page a hard 404 (not found). The other option is to do a 410, which indicates to the search engine that the page is gone.

The page content is lacking or contains many references with resources that can’t be loaded.

If a lack of content is the case, you will want to make adding content to that page a priority. If resources aren’t loading, one of the reasons may be that the page includes blocked resources (blocked by robots.txt). It could also be that there are slow loading or very large resources that need to be addressed.

The page has moved or been replaced

The best option in this circumstance is to do a 301 redirect to a relevant page.

Google incorrectly marks the page as a Soft 404

If you think that your page shouldn’t be flagged as a soft 404, use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to examine the provided content and the returned HTTP code.

Ecreative Can Help Address 404 Errors

Contact Ecreative today to ensure that your website is optimized using best practices and avoid issues like soft 404s.