How to deal with Soft 404 error?

I am getting soft 404 errors often. I am not getting why it is cumming often to me. Today i found nearly 20 soft 404 errors. i am sharing snap shot of this. Does it effect on my ranking. Why it is coming?. Is there any solution to stop this permanently.

Did you read Google’s guidelines on the subject?

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Dealing with Not Found pages we create Custom 404 page. But when custom 404 start to show 200 error it is called soft 404 pages.
It is very easy to deal with this issues by creating again custom 404 page and a developer can do it easily.

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Thank you varsharthi, i did not think about custom 404 till now, now i will focus on it…Thanks again.

Then you obviously hadn’t read Google’s guidelines which I linked to above.

You can improve the user experience by configuring your site to display a custom 404 page when returning a 404 response code. For example, you could create a page containing a list of your most popular pages, or a link to your home page, or a feedback link. But it’s important to remember that it’s not enough to just create a page that displays a 404 message. You also need to return the correct 404 or 410 HTTP response code.

thought I would add a little about soft 404’s as I get many :slight_smile:

I get most of my soft 404’s from redirecting pages to other pages that have absolutely nothing to do with the original page, you see when you start learning SEO you make plenty of mistakes, you listen to the rubbish out there about SEO then realise you just ruined your website :joy: now I could let all these broken pages go to a 404 page, according to Google guidelines and most of the respected SEO’s out there that would be the correct thing to do (and recommended in most situations), unfortunately I see a big drop in traffic by having a 404 page so I redirect everything to another top level page, it seems to work better for me although I don’t recommend doing this unless you have thousands of broken pages and lots of websites linking to those pages :slight_smile:

If i remove those errors from webmaster tool, then will it cause any effect to my site. Because i dont have much programming knowledge to solve this issue. I want to know one more thing that due to these errors will it effect on post indexing.

All the answers to your questions are in the Google help page I linked to. Is there something specific there that you don’t understand?

So the first thing you need to do is to establish why these errors are occurring, and ensure you are handling requests for non-existent pages correctly.

just install plugin or make 404 error page and redirect non working page to 404 page :slight_smile: simple