Reasons for Finding and Fixing Soft 404 Errors

In plain English, the HTTP status code is a means of helping search engines understand if their request to fetch a page was successful or not.

Each time a search engine accesses a web page, it looks out for the HTTP status code first. The said HTTP status code is a 3-digit number which is code 200 (for Valid Page), code 404/410 (for Page not Found), and 301 (Page Moved).

The HTTP status code can only be seen by the search crawler but not search users. To ensure that your website is at its best, you need to find and fix any cases of soft 404.

It's not a good experience for users to visit your site from organic search only to find that the page doesn't exist. I don't expect that person to come visiting your site anytime soon because of this experience.

Another way a soft 404 error affects your site is in the wasted time spent by search engines in crawling a page that doesn't exist. It's not an experience anyone would be proud of, so you've got to do something about this soft 404 early enough.