Soft 404s

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Tagged: Soft 404s

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April 5, 2017 at 3:27 pm #372008

Ronny
Full Member

Post count: 40

I’m getting a whole lot of soft 404s on Google console, the reason being when I have a listing in one category in one specific region, and you search that region for any of the other categories, the result would be ‘No Result Found’.

Though I have some generic %location% text on the page, Google still reads it as a soft 404. If this is the pattern, across my whole directory there is going to be a huge amount of soft 404s, which is negative for SEO. Is there a way to prevent this??

April 7, 2017 at 7:39 am #372434

Kor
Moderator

Post count: 16516

Hi Ronny,

I’ve notified a developer and he will look into this as soon as possible.

Thanks!

April 7, 2017 at 9:07 am #372447

Stiofan O’Connor
Site Admin

Post count: 22956

This reply has been marked as private.

April 7, 2017 at 5:04 pm #372503

Ronny
Full Member

Post count: 40

Ok, thanks a lot guys. And yes you could be on the right track there there Stiofan; as it happens just after I posted here I had the idea to put the Gd popular post widget at the bottom of all the location/categories pages, with the title ‘other categories in this location’.

So at least they link to something concrete and relevant to that particular location (From what I understand Google can throw up a soft 404 on a page if the content or what it links to are deemed somehow a dead end or irrelevant generic content)

I haven’t had any more soft 404s for the last couple of days so maybe that is the solution. I’ll keep you posted!

April 7, 2017 at 5:07 pm #372504

Paolo
Site Admin

Post count: 31206

Either we add the 404 http code to the header of those pages or we server some “related” content like trip advisor does.

We added a task to implement the second option.

Thanks
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