Soft 404s for unpublished & 301'd content
-
Hi,
One site I work with unpublished a lot of thin content. Great idea, right?
These unpublished pages were then 301'd up to the main category page that they previously existed in.
Now Google Webmaster Tools calls them out as soft 404 errors. This seems unexpected since the pages
were 301'd. Here is my question; Is this a serious problem that may affect the site's overall organic results
and if so what should I do about it?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Short answer: create a custom 404 page, not just for these pages, but one that can show for everypage on your site.
A few resources:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93641?hl=en
Example: http://moz.com/sadfklfadsadfjs
-
Cyrus, thanks for hanging in there with my questions. If I just give back a 404, what am I showing them on the page?
I would think seeing the main questions page would be better than just sitting at the original url and looking at 404 page notice - seems like a bad user experience if Google wants to get all user-experiency about it.
Thanks... Darcy
-
Yes, it's possible, but that could be considered cloaking. I'd say best to return a 404.
-
Hi Cyrus,
Have not experienced a dip, but things have been a little static.
Can you do both... forward the page and give back a 404?
What would you do?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Yes, I would think that at the point Google crawls it and finds it forwarded it would drop it from the index and not waste resources crawling it again unless linked somewhere. I will keep an eye out for links, but don't believe that there are any.
Thanks, Dirk... Darcy
-
In that case, sounds like you should either:
- 404 them if you have evidence these have hurt your rankings/traffic (have you experienced a dip?)
- Ignore them and go about your day
-
Hi Cyrus,
Thanks for the info. These are forum pages where no one ever answered the question, so
there is no helpful info and very little content.
They were forwarded up to the main questions page (one / up the url structure).
The page they were forwarded to is like a questions category page, not specific to the subject of the
forwarded page. These forwarded pages don't get much/any traffic because they never ranked
and we didn't promote them.
If it doesn't hurt overall search on other pages, I'd rather not go to the substantial effort of finding subject-relevant pages to forward to, since no one will ever go to the original url and need to see something super relevant.
Your thoughts? Thanks! Best... Darcy
-
If Fetch like Google is also giving a 301 - I would mark them as solved in WMT & check if they re-appear.
If you click on the i next to the redirect message in Fetch like Google - it shows the type of redirect & the page it's redirecting to. I assume you checked that this is also a 301.I have a similar issue on one of my sites - if a user gets to a non-existing url - the server first tries to find out if the page exists - if it doesn't it's redirected to a 404 page. Although technically it is a 301 - WMT sees them as a soft 404 as the destination page is a "Page not found" type of page (called 404.php) - which (quite ironically) renders a 200 status.
On the destination page - do you mention somewhere a message like "page not found" or is it just a plain category page?
The SEO impact is difficult to assess - Google says these pages are mainly wasting the bot's time as it's indexing pages that do no longer exist, not sure if it is also affecting rankings. As you did the crawl with Screaming Frog, I guess you are also removing all internal links to these redirected pages? If these links disappear, and as the content was thin, I suspect you don't have many external links pointing to them, so the problem should disappear after a while.
rgds,
Dirk
-
If Google thinks the 301 leads to a page that isn't relevant enough, they may flag it as a "soft 404" even though it returns a 301. That's Google's way of saying they think you should 404 these pages instead.
How much will it hurt you? Probably not much, but it's hard to say.
Let's ask these questions:
- How much traffic goes to these pages? If not much, is it okay to 404 them?
- Are there more relevant pages you could redirect these to? (ideally, something with a similar title as the original page?)
- Have you seen much traffic loss overall? If not, it's likely this isn't hurting you.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
Okay, that is extra weird. It could be that GWT hasn't update your information since you made the changes. Since everywhere else is telling it's correct -- especially the fetch tool -- then you should wait a few more days and see if it updates.
-
Hi Erica,
I'm saying that the only place it shows a soft 404 is in GWT errors. Screaming Frog, web-sniffer and now Fetch As Google In GWT, all show them as 301 re-directs. I can't re-direct them more than they are. So, is GWT just goofy?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Hi Darcy,
Yeah, if it's still showing as a soft 404, there's still something wrong. I'd try using fetch and render as Google bot and see what happens.
Best of luck!
-
Hi Dirk,
Thanks for the suggestion. As noted above, I put the whole list thru screaming frog and a few thru your suggestion of web-sniffer.net.
95% of the whole list is 301s and 100% of the few put one at a time thru web-sniffer come back as 301s.
My question remains "Is this a serious problem that may affect the site's overall organic results
and if so what should I do about it?"
Thanks... Darcy
-
Hi Erica,
I put the list through screaming frog and 95% of the urls are shown as 301s.
Do you think screaming frog has it right or is there something they wouldn't catch?
Thanks... Darcy
-
Maybe an obvious question but did you check that the url's are indeed properly redirected - checking them with 'Fetch like Google' in WMT or by using a tool like web-sniffer.net?
rgds,
Dirk
-
I'd check to make sure your 301s were done correctly. If they are showing up as soft 404s, they are probably implemented wrong.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Shall we add engaging and useful FAQ content in all our pages or rather not because of duplication and reduction of unique content?
We are considering to add at the end of alll our 1500 product pages answers to the 9 most frequently asked questions. These questions and answers will be 90% identical for all our products and personalizing them more is not an option and not so necessary since most questions are related to the process of reserving the product. We are convinced this will increase engagement of users with the page, time on page and it will be genuinely useful for the visitor as most visitors will not visit the seperate FAQ page. Also it will add more related keywords/topics to the page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
On the downside it will reduce the percentage of unique content per page and adds duplication. Any thoughts about wether in terms of google rankings we should go ahead and benefits in form of engagement may outweight downside of duplication of content?0 -
Change of content
Hello, When you do a major change of content on a page I know it takes time to start seeing some results in terms of ranking. Let's say I make a change today expecting to see the first results of that change 2 months from now. Let's say in a month I decide to add some content and make again some minor changes. Do I have to wait another 2 months starting on the date I made my 2 nd changes to see some results or will I see the results of the 1 change as originally planned 2 months after my major content change ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Hreflang targeted website using the root directory's description & title
Hi there, Recently I applied the href lang tags like so: Unfortunately, the Australian site uses the same description and title as the US site (which was the root directory initially), am i doing something wrong? Would appreciate any response, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oliverkuchies0 -
301 / 404 & Getting Rid of Keyword Pages
I had a feeling that my keyword focused pages were causing my site not to rank well. I do not have that many keywords. I have 2 main keyword phrases along with 6 city locations. For example (fake) "tea house tampa" "tea house clearwater" "tea house sarasota" and "tea room tampa" "tea room cleawater" "tea house sarasota". So, I don't feel that I need that many pages. I feel like I can optimize my home page and maybe 1 or 2 topic pages. Right now, I have a keyword for each of those phrases. These are all internal pages on 1 domain. Not multiple domains. Sooo... I tested it by 301ing a few of my "tea house" KW pages to the home page. And low and behold... my home page rose BIG TIME! Major improvement! I'm talking like 13th to 2nd! Here is my question... how should I proceed? My SEO has warned me against 301ing too many pages all pointing to the home page. He says that will negatively impact my ratings. Should I 404 some pages? Should I build a "tea room" topic page and 301 that set there? What is worse? 301 or 404? How many is too many? I'm really excited by these results, but I'm scare to move forward and hurt what has happened. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CalicoKitty20000 -
Duplicate content when changing a site's URL due to algorithm penalty
Greetings A client was hit by penguin 2.1, my guess is that this was due to linkbuilding using directories. Google webmaster tools has detected about 117 links to the site and they are all from directories. Furthermore, the anchor texts are a bit too "perfect" to be natural, so I guess this two factors have earned the client's site an algorithm penalty (no manual penalty warning has been received in GWT). I have started to clean some of the backlinks, on Oct the 11th. Some of the webmasters I asked complied with my request to eliminate backlinks, some didn´t, I disavowed the links from the later. I saw some improvements on mid october for the most important KW (see graph) but ever since then the rankings have been falling steadily. I'm thinking about giving up on the domain name and just migrating the site to a new URL. So FINALLY MY QUESTION IS: if I migrate this 6-page site to a new URL, should I change the content completely ? I mean, if I just copy paste the content of the curent site into a new URL I will incur in dpolicate content, correct?. Is there some of the content I can copy ? or should I just start from scratch? Cheers hRggeNE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Masoko-T0 -
301 Redirects?
We have an e-commerce website with about 4500 products for sale. About 1200 of these items were not showing up in the Google PLA ads because they were $0 dollar items, so we made those products invisible. Then Set 301 Redirects for each of the 1200 items. My question is this; we want to turn back on the 1200 items, should we delete the 301 redirects that are in place for them.? Will it hurt SEO performance by having them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Goriilla0 -
Should I 'nofollow' links between my own sites?
We have five sites which are largely unrelated but for cross-promotional purpose our company wishes to cross link between all our sites, possibly in the footer. I have warned about potential consequences of cross-linking in this way and certainly don't want our sites to be viewed as some sort of 'link ring' if they all link to one another. Just wondering if linking between sites you own really is that much of an issue and whether we should 'nofollow' the links in order to prevent being slapped with any sort of penalty for cross-linking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simon_realbuzz0 -
How should I exclude content?
I have category pages on an e-commerce site that are showing up as duplicate pages. On top of each page are register and login, and when selected they come up as category/login and category/register. I have 3 options to attempt to fix this and was wondering what you think is the best. 1. Use robots.txt to exclude. There are hundreds of categories so it could become large. 2. Use canonical tags. 3. Force Login and Register to go to their own page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0