Why the sudden increase in soft 404s?
-
I haven't made any changes to my site but in a week I am showing 30-40 soft 404s in Webmaster Tools. This just started happening in the last 2 weeks. When I click to go to the pages they are fine, and even fetch and render works fine on the pages.
-
They have stopped, with no changes to the site. I have no idea why. Thank you for the offer though.
-
Hi EcommerceSite!
Would love to help you figure this out - please PM the URL. Thanks!
-
It seems to have stopped with no changes to the site. I have no idea why.
-
Hi EcommerceSite,
Can't see an answer to your question so far, are you still having issues?
If you want to send me a pm with your url then I'll have a look at this for you.
Tom
-
I can send it in a message.
-
Hi EcommerceSite!
It really sounds like folks will need to check out your site, or at least have a lot more information, in order to give much more advice. Is that something you can share?
-
Loading times have stayed really stable.
There are no 404 errors in either tool.
Using the fetch as Googlebot tool the pages all work fine.
It doesn't make any sense.
-
Hi,
This can occur if Google's crawlers for some reason is not able to reach some of your pages. It could be related to some network issues, or temporary server issues. A few things to look at:
- Do you see any increased loading times for your pages?
- When looking at the page with firebug or chrome's inspector tools - do you see any 404 errors returned
- What result do you get if using the Fetch as Googlebot tool?
Hope this helps
Best regards,Anders
-
It'd be great if you can share what your site is so people can check it out and see if they can figure out what's going on. Thanks!
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
-
What's the best way to deal with deleted .php files showing as 404s in WMT?
Disclaimer: I am not a developer During a recent site migration I have seen a bit of an increase in WMT of 404 errors on pages ending .php. Click on the link in WMT and it just shows as File Not Found - no 404 page. There are about 20 in total showing in webmaster tools and I want to advise the IT department what to do. What is the best way to deal with this for on-page best practice? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blaze-Communication0 -
What are Soft 404's and are they a problem
Hi, I have some old pages that were coming up in google WMT as a 404. These had links into them so i thought i'd do a 301 back to either the home page or to a relevant category or page. However these are now listed in WMT as soft 404's. I'm not sure what this means and whether google is saying it doesn't like this? Any advice welcomed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
301s Creating Soft 404s in GWT
Hi, We re-did a section of a site and got rid of hundreds of pages of no longer relevant content. We 301'd the urls to the category homepage. Now, GWT calls these soft 404s. a) Should we have done something differently instead of 301ing? b) Are these hundreds of soft 404 errors a big problem or threat to how Google sees us for SEO? c) Should we correct this in some way? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Why the sudden link drop?
A the end of November I am showing that our total links were 118k. Current links are 22k. We changed sites early November so that was about three weeks before. What would cause the drop of about 100k links? Or where should I start investigating?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Sudden rankings drop for our most profitable keyword?
Hi, I was hoping you could help me with a troubling issue that has come up this week. We have consistently ranked in the top 3 for the keyword "grey goose glasses" for the last 12 months. We received 74 visits from this keyword from Dec 3 to Jan 3. For some reason on Jan 4th we dropped from the top 3 to somewhere around 40-70 and receive almost no traffic from this keyword an longer. The page that was ranking was http://thebottlemill.com/tbm/grey-goose-drinking-glass.html I have since changes a the Page title and URL with a 301 redirect and the H1 tag to be a better match but this was just done yesterday. We havent seemed to be effected like this on other keywords. Any suggestions would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bottlemill0 -
How to increase the page rank for keyword for entire site
sorry for my bad english is there any way to increase the ranking for a keyword for the entire site .i know that seo is done per page basis .my site contains 1000ds of posts and i cant get back links for each and every post .so i picked 4 keywords which are mostly used while searching my products , is there any method i can increase my ranking for those keywords like increasing domain authority EXAMPLE :like if i want to increase my ranking for "buy laptop" .if any user searches In google with buy laptop i want my site or any of related pages that match the user search query must show up in front
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | prakash.moturu0 -
Increasing Internal Links But Avoiding a Link Farm
I'm looking to create a page about Widgets and all of the more specific names for Widgets we sell: ABC Brand Widgets, XYZ Brand Widgets, Big Widgets, Small Widgets, Green Widgets, Blue Widgets, etc. I'd like my Widget page to give a brief explanation about each kind of Widget with a link deeper into my site that gives more detail and allows you to purchase. The problem is I have a lot of Widgets and this could get messy: ABC Green Widgets, Small XYZ Widgets, many combinations. I can see my Widget page teetering on being a link farm if I start throwing in all of these combos. So where should I stop? How much do I do? I've read more than 100 links on a page being considered a link farm, is that a hardline number or a general guideline?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10 -
Does Google penalize for having a bunch of Error 404s?
If a site removes thousands of pages in one day, without any redirects, is there reason to think Google will penalize the site for this? I have thousands of subcategory index pages. I've figured out a way to reduce the number, but it won't be easy to put in redirects for the ones I'm deleting. They will just disappear. There's no link juice issue. These pages are only linked internally, and indexed in Google. Nobody else links to them. Does anyone think it would be better to remove the pages gradually over time instead of all at once? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Interesting.com0