Impact of soft 404 errors on SEO: clarification and recommendations
Recently on LinkedIn, Gary Illies, an analyst at Google, drew attention to two problems with web crawlers: "soft 404" errors and other "cryptographic" errors. These seemingly innocent mistakes can negatively affect your SEO efforts.
"Crawlers use the status codes to interpret whether a fetch was successful, even if the contents of the page is basically just an error message. They might happily go back to the same page again and again wasting your resources, and if there are many such pages, exponentially more resources."
🚀 Soft 404 errors occur when a web server returns the standard HTTP status code "200 OK" for pages that do not exist or contain an error message. This confuses web crawlers, forcing them to waste resources on non-existent or useless content.
- 📌 Soft 404 errors can affect website indexing and visibility.
- 📌 Using the appropriate HTTP status code when an error occurs can help web crawlers allocate resources more efficiently.
- 📌 Proactively addressing soft 404 errors can improve your website's indexing, crawling, and SEO.
How to identify and resolve "soft 404" errors on your website?
Regularly monitor your website's crawl reports and logs to identify pages that return HTTP 200 status codes despite an error message. Implement appropriate error handling on your server to ensure error pages are displayed with appropriate HTTP status codes (eg 404 for "not found", 410 for "permanently deleted"). Use tools like Google Search Console to monitor your site's coverage and identify pages flagged as soft 404 errors.
Why are "soft 404" errors a problem for SEO?
Soft 404 errors can affect SEO because they mislead web crawlers into wasting their resources on unnecessary content. This can affect the indexing of the website in search engines and reduce its visibility.
How do soft 404 errors affect my website visitors?
Although site visitors may not notice these errors, they can lower your site's visibility in search results, resulting in less traffic.
Статтю згенеровано з використанням ШІ на основі зазначеного матеріалу, відредаговано та перевірено автором вручну для точності та корисності.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-warns-of-soft-404-errors-and-their-impact-on-seo/521016/