Identify Soft 404 Errors in Google Webmaster Tools

To help people know if their website encounters unsought ‘crypto’ or ‘soft’ 404s, a new feature has been introduced in recent times. A ‘soft’ 404 comes about when the server displays a ‘200 OK HTTP response code’ in response for a webpage that does not exist, before 404 Not Found. ‘Soft 404s’ restricts a website’s crawling coverage by major search engines, as these may be duplicate URLs which are indexed in the end, in place of web-pages with quality content.

The world of internet is wide, but the overall time a search engine spends indexing your website is restricted. The web pages with proper 410 or 404 response code can, no doubt, positively affect craw coverage of site’s unique content. However, ‘soft 404’ may be puzzling for visitors, and search engine may invest much of its time indexing or crawling the duplicate URLs that do not even exist.

This reporting 404’s feature is given in ‘Crawl Errors’ option in ‘Webmaster Tools‘.

There is a step by step procedure that visitors and search engines can use to rectify soft 404s. First, you need to find whether you have ‘soft 404’ under Webmaster Tools. For this, he needs to identify:

• The URL has quality content and adequately returns ‘200’ response, not soft 404.
• The URL does not exist and so must return a 410 or 404 response code

The next step is to verify that you have setup adequate ‘HTTP response’ by making use of ‘Fetch as Googlebot’ under the section of Webmaster Tools. Now, if 404s is displaying, one may wish to make changes in his ‘404 page’ to help the visitors. This way, you will be able to discover and rectify ‘soft 404s’ on your website.