Indexability and crawling
How to fix soft 404 errors
URLs that do not exist on your site answer with a normal 200 page instead of a 404. Google ends up indexing an unlimited number of near-empty pages, and broken links on your own site become invisible to you.
What it is, and what it costs
How to fix it
Make your server return a real 404 status for addresses that do not exist. The page can still be friendly and branded; the status code is what matters. Never redirect missing pages to the homepage; that is the classic way to create soft 404s.
How to check your site
Visit a URL you know is fake and check the status in the browser's Network tab; it should say 404, not 200. Google Search Console reports soft 404s under Pages.
What this looks like in practice
A site redirected every bad URL to its homepage, thinking it was helpful. Google indexed hundreds of homepage duplicates and flagged them all as soft 404s. Returning a real 404 for missing URLs cleared it up.
Questions people ask
- Is redirecting a dead page to the homepage a good idea?
- No. It returns 200, hides the broken link, and creates a soft 404. Show a real 404 page, or redirect to a genuinely relevant page instead.
Does your site have this?
Check your site to see whether missing pages return the right status.
See also
- How to fix canonical tag problemsA canonical tag names the real URL for a page when the same content is reachable more than one way. Getting it wrong is quieter than most SEO faults: nothing on the page looks broken, and its value quietly goes to the wrong address — or to one that cannot rank at all.
- How to fix XML sitemap problemsA sitemap is how search engines discover pages your own links do not lead to well, and how they learn something changed. Two things go wrong with it: there is not one, or the one you have lists URLs that do not work.
- How to fix a page accidentally set to “noindex”If a page you care about is nowhere in Google, not even when you search its exact title, a noindex tag is the first thing to rule out. It is one line, it overrides everything else you do for that page, and it usually got there by accident.
- How to fix a robots.txt that blocks your whole siteDisallow: / in your robots.txt is the fastest way to disappear from search. It asks every crawler to skip the whole site at once, and it is a common leftover from launch day.