The process of crawling these non-existent pages will invariably take up needless amounts of the crawl budget assigned to the site. Sticking with the idea of crawl budgets, if a website has a high proportion of soft 404 errors, then those pages will be crawled. Google doesn’t want to waste endless time crawling content on the same website, so it makes sense for them to assign a ‘budget’ to their web crawls before moving on to another website. This is based on how popular your pages are and how stale the content in Google’s index is
#404 not found meaning code#
If your website returns an HTTP status code other than a 404 ( or 410) for a non-existent page, it can negatively impact the website’s performance in organic search. When a soft 404 error is returned the page is still crawled and indexed. When a true 404 error message is returned, Google’s bots don’t spend time crawling or indexing the page. Crawling and indexing is a process Google’s bots go through before listing your website’s pages in search engine result pages. This distinction is important for SEO because it determines how Google treats the page. The important thing to remember here is that the content of a web page is entirely unrelated to the HTTP response returned by the server. They can also occur when the non-existent page redirects users to an irrelevant page, such as the homepage, instead of returning an HTTP 404 status code. Similarly, just because a page says 404, doesn’t mean it’s returning a 404 status code.”Ī soft 404 error occurs when a non-existent page (a page that has been deleted/removed) displays a ‘page not found’ message to anyone trying to access it but fails to return an HTTP 404 status code. Just because the name tag says it’s a dog, doesn’t mean it’s actually a dog. In Google’s own words: “ This is like a giraffe wearing a name tag that says ‘dog’. What most people don’t understand is that the content of the page – ‘page not found’ message – is entirely unrelated to the HTTP response returned by the server. Just because a page displays a 404 File Not Found message, it does not mean that this page is automatically defined as a 404 page. This informs both browsers and search engines that the page doesn’t exist. Why fixing soft 404 errors will help your website’s performanceĪ true 404 error message occurs when a website’s server returns an HTTP 404 standard response code to indicate that it couldn’t find the webpage ( URL ) that was requested by the user.
This article will focus on one particular category of crawl error, one that, if left unresolved, can hugely reduce the amount of pages search engines such as Google crawl and index in their search results. This can be detrimental to a website’s performance in search results, which is why SEO specialists need to work closely with web developers. Marketers sometimes overlook such technical aspects of websites and expect web developers to handle them instead. But did you know using this error message in the wrong context can generate what’s known as a soft 404, which can impact your SEO performance? You are likely to be familiar with the 404 error code which tells you the webpage you are looking for hasn’t been found. It is important to fix them so that your website can perform well from an SEO perspective. Soft 404 errors are different from the usual 404 errors and can be harmful to your site.
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