I love technical SEO (most of the time). However, it can be frustrating to come across the same site problems over and over again. In the years I've been doing SEO, I'm still surprised to see so many different websites suffering from the same issues.
Soft 404 errors
A soft 404 is a page that looks like a 404 but returns a HTTP status code 200. In this instance, the user sees some text along the lines of "Sorry the page you requested cannot be found." But behind the scenes, a code 200 is telling search engines that the page is working correctly. This disconnect can cause problems with pages being crawled and indexed when you do not want them to be.
A soft 404 also means you cannot spot real broken pages and identify areas of your website where users are receiving a bad experience. From a link building perspective (I had to mention it somewhere!), neither solution is a good option. You may have incoming links to broken URLs, but the links will be hard to track down and redirect to the correct page.
How to solve:
Fortunately, this is a relatively simply fix for a developer who can set the page to return a 404 status code instead of a 200. Whilst you're there, you can have some fun and make a cool 404 page for your user's enjoyment.
To find soft 404s, you can use the feature in Google Webmaster Tools which will tell you about the ones Google has detected
302 redirects instead of 301 redirects
Again, this is an easy redirect for developers to get wrong because, from a user's perspective, they can't tell the difference. However, the search engines treat these redirects very differently. Just to recap, a 301 redirect is permanent and the search engines will treat it as such; they'll pass link equity across to the new page. A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect and the search engines will not pass link equity because they expect the original page to come back at some point.
How to solve:
To find 302 redirected URLs, I recommend using a deep crawler such as Screaming Frog or the IIS SEO Toolkit. You can then filter by 302s and check to see if they should really be 302s, or if they should be 301s instead.
To fix the problem, you will need to ask your developers to change the rule so that a 301 redirect is used rather than a 302 redirect.
Soft 404 errors
A soft 404 is a page that looks like a 404 but returns a HTTP status code 200. In this instance, the user sees some text along the lines of "Sorry the page you requested cannot be found." But behind the scenes, a code 200 is telling search engines that the page is working correctly. This disconnect can cause problems with pages being crawled and indexed when you do not want them to be.
A soft 404 also means you cannot spot real broken pages and identify areas of your website where users are receiving a bad experience. From a link building perspective (I had to mention it somewhere!), neither solution is a good option. You may have incoming links to broken URLs, but the links will be hard to track down and redirect to the correct page.
How to solve:
Fortunately, this is a relatively simply fix for a developer who can set the page to return a 404 status code instead of a 200. Whilst you're there, you can have some fun and make a cool 404 page for your user's enjoyment.
To find soft 404s, you can use the feature in Google Webmaster Tools which will tell you about the ones Google has detected
302 redirects instead of 301 redirects
Again, this is an easy redirect for developers to get wrong because, from a user's perspective, they can't tell the difference. However, the search engines treat these redirects very differently. Just to recap, a 301 redirect is permanent and the search engines will treat it as such; they'll pass link equity across to the new page. A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect and the search engines will not pass link equity because they expect the original page to come back at some point.
How to solve:
To find 302 redirected URLs, I recommend using a deep crawler such as Screaming Frog or the IIS SEO Toolkit. You can then filter by 302s and check to see if they should really be 302s, or if they should be 301s instead.
To fix the problem, you will need to ask your developers to change the rule so that a 301 redirect is used rather than a 302 redirect.
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