What Are Soft 404 Errors?

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Hi, I’m Chris Long with Go Fish Digital and welcome to another episode of “60-Second SEO”.

Today we’re going to talk about what a Soft 404 error is, why there might be issues for your site, and how you can fix them.

Google defines a Soft 404 error as an instance where the web server responds with a 200 status code, but that page doesn’t exist. This is a pretty good example on DSW site. Let’s say that I go in here and I type some nonsensical URL into the address bar. I type this in and it looks like no results are found. But when I check the status of the page, a 200 status is found.

So even though there’s no results and we’re getting this error type of page, Google is or the web server is saying it’s okay to crawl and index this page when really there’s no content. What instead you need to do is actually return either a hard 404 or 410 error to really signal to search engines they can’t crawl the page.

Cole Haan does this well. You type in a nonsensical URL. Here they have a dedicated error page and here they give a 410 response indicating that search engines should not be crawling or indexing the content and reducing possible crawl budget implications.

So it’s a great way to understand what soft 404 errors are and how you can avoid them in the future.

About Chris Long

Chris Long is the VP of Marketing at Go Fish Digital. With 10+ years of SEO experience, Chris works unique problems and advanced search situations to help clients improve organic traffic through a deep understanding of Google's algorithm and web technology. Chris has advised on the search strategies for clients such as GEICO, Adobe & The New York Times. He is a contributor for Moz, Search Engine Land, and Search Engine Journal. He is also a speaker at industry conferences such as MozCon, SMX East, BrightonSEO and more.