What are Soft 404 Errors and How to Fix Them?

[yusra]

What are soft 404 errors, how are they generated when web servers return incorrect 200 or 3xx status codes for pages that no longer exist, and what methods can site owners use to identify, troubleshoot and properly return 404 status codes to avoid negative SEO impacts?

 

[saoussen5765]

@yusra the 404 error could be to prevent a member from accessing some content so instead of access denied they return 404 - not found while if you are someone authorized to access the content the page renders fully for you. Add to that you may need to know that is feasible programmatically.

 

[aninditasen]

@yusra the 404 error could be to prevent a member from accessing some content so instead of access denied they return 404 - not found while if you are someone authorized to access the content the page renders fully for you. Add to that you may need to know that is feasible programmatically.

Thanks for the knowledge. Now I know why some government web pages in my state show this error of 404. They deny us access but that's wrong as we have a right to know how our complaint is being handled and what steps have been taken.

 

[Suba]

Soft 404 errors often confuse search engines, because the page they are going to is different from the page displayed, Google console also often crawls empty or low quality pages, so basically if the crawl process encounters problems then the indexing process will also be problematic and so there will definitely be traffic. will be low. So a page with a soft 404 error shouldn't exist but the CMS thinks the page exists, so you need to fix the page content, create a bookmark and clear the caching.

 

[Sojourn]

Thanks for the knowledge. Now I know why some government web pages in my state show this error of 404. They deny us access but that's wrong as we have a right to know how our complaint is being handled and what steps have been taken.

404 error also gets shown in the browser when a webpage's URL address gets changed but a hyperlink still points to the old and obsolete address.

403 is actually the status code for access denied, but some website owners modify the return status code to show 404 instead of 403.