Technical SEO requires that you constantly search out and fix errors wherever they occur. This can be a tough task for anyone especially if you do not know what errors you're looking for.

One such hard-to-discover error is soft 404 which, if not checked, will affect your site's SEO. But you need not worry because this guide will show you how to find soft 404 errors and fix them before they harm your SEO.

We will kick off with a basic intro of soft 404 before covering how to find and fix them.

About Soft 404

Whenever a page is requested from a web server, there are 3 HTTP status codes to expect from that server.

If the server cannot find the page, then it will return either 404 or 410 HTTP status codes. But if the page was found, the server will then return the HTTP status code 200 OK for (success).

However, when a page cannot be found by the server or it is invalid but the server still returns a 200 OK status code, a soft 404 error has occurred. What this means is that the server ends up giving search engines the wrong status code.

If search engines had received a 404 or 410 error code from the server, there would be no need to crawl or index that page. This is because the server has notified the engines that either page was missing or invalid.

But if the search engines get a 200 OK status code, it then implies that the page exists on the server, even though it doesn't. This will make search engines keep crawling the page and listing it in their search results.

Any number of reasons could cause web pages to experience soft 404 errors such as:

• A page is falsely marked as "seems to be a 404" while there are no problems with the page
• Google thinks a particular page should have returned 404 or 410 simply because your page has little or no content, but it returns 200 OK code
• Google may be having some temporal issues with crawling the page and so concludes that there is no content on it.