Soft 404 | Search Console

[rox94]

I’ve noticed that Google Search Console is showing a lot of soft 404s for my pages. The pages are returning a 200 status, and I’ve been adding content to improve them. Despite this, Search Console still marks them as soft 404s.


Has anyone encountered this issue before? If so, how did you resolve it?

Thanks in advance!

 

[tiiberius]

Are you sure they are the pages in question?

Soft 404s can also be old pages, lazily redirected to homepage.

 

[rox94]

The pages that are experiencing issues are the product/category pages by city. You can access them through internal links or the advanced filter. I have products listed on these pages, and templates are available at the bottom of the products, where you can add text and content to the page.

 

[tiiberius]

The pages that are experiencing issues are the product/category pages by city. You can access them through internal links or the advanced filter. I have products listed on these pages, and templates are available at the bottom of the products, where you can add text and content to the page.

I'm not such heavy user of GSC but I find it to be greatly delayed in reporting.

When have you made these changes?

 

[hideath]

It's surely a website technical problem, the pages are returning 404 errors for Google for some reason,
No one could blindly tell the reason behind this, it could be due to some script ( within the theme, plugins, custom, etc...),
Check the website using a different browser and incognito mode, delete the website/browser cache, double-check the .htaccess file, etc.
If you're using WP, change the website theme, disable plugins (1 by 1), double-check for any added scripts to find whatever is causing the issue

 

[rox94]

The page is built with Laravel, not WordPress.

 

[rox94]

I'm not such heavy user of GSC but I find it to be greatly delayed in reporting.

When have you made these changes?

The improvements and updates have been made in the last 2 weeks.

 

[rox94]

The pages marked as soft 404 are actually returning a 200 OK status, which is intentional. These pages are meant to be indexed, as they contain content that I want to appear in search results. The issue is likely due to how Google interprets the content, but I'm ensuring they're correctly served as 200 OK.

 

[tiiberius]

The improvements and updates have been made in the last 2 weeks.

That is quite old.

The pages marked as soft 404 are actually returning a 200 OK status, which is intentional. These pages are meant to be indexed, as they contain content that I want to appear in search results. The issue is likely due to how Google interprets the content, but I'm ensuring they're correctly served as 200 OK.

View attachment 434634

That's what soft 404s are mostly. 404 pages that return 200 code.

200 code might be in place but engine thinks they should be 404s.

You need to inspect the URLs and see what they actually see.

Recrawl and resubmit to index.

 

[Soli3258]

Have you solved this? I have the same problem with the website I built using Shopify.