Soft 404s from search terms on 404 page showing up in webmaster tools

[gemmasantos]

Hi everyone I just recently switched to the genesis framework a little while ago and I’m suddenly getting a couple of soft 404 errors on google webmaster tools.

I think they are all coming from the search box on the 404 page since that’s the only search box I have found on the site, they all have the term {search_term} as the search query and the page gives me a “Sorry, no content matched your criteria.” result.

I would love some advice on how to solve this issue.

This is what I see on the webmaster tool

Soft 404
Url: mypage.com/search/{search_term}/

Linked from
mypage/search/{search_term}/
mypage.com/?s={search_term}

Thank you,

Gemma

[John_Betong]

Hi @gemmasantos and welcome to SitePoint

This may be relevant…

I recently started using the Laravel PHP Framework and struggled with the fixed 200 http response and instead send a 404 Not found response.

To override the 200 response for pages not found I send a PHP http_response_code(404) then check for the http_response_code() value. If it is not 200 then the header adds the following which are now showing in Google Webmaster Tools as Soft 404s:

<meta content="noindex,nofollow" name="slurp" />
<meta content="noindex,nofollow" name="robots" />
<meta content="noindex,nofollow" name="msnbot" />
<meta content="noindex,nofollow" name="googlebot" />

Check the source code of the failed searches and see if the meta noindex,no follow parameters have been sent.

I am not familiar with WordPress and cannot suggest any solutions.

[rambabuseo]

Hi John,

It is fine to let these restricted, getting not crawled anymore.

But If I want to find where these soft errors are being come from ?

Can you please help me ? also find screenshot link

[John_Betong]

Hi @rambabuseo and welcome to the forum.

The Webmaster Tools screenshot lists 280 pages with 404 soft-errors. Clicking on any of the links will open a new tab showing the 404 soft-error page. Most of the 404 soft-errors are from searches.

I do not think there is anything to worry about in fact I tried a couple of the links and your search page appeared.

[rambabuseo]

Thanks John for the reply,
It’s really nothing serious that i should worry about here, as it names SOFT ERRORS to these.

Ram