WHAT IS A 404 ERROR MESSAGE CODE TO INDICATE

In an API, this can also mean that the endpoint is valid but the resource itself does not exist. In the browser, this means the URL is not recognized. The server can not find the requested resource.

If you have any features turned on, take a look at your Advanced settings. It is important to fix them so that your website can perform well from an SEO perspective.Charge Your Car (CYC) is the UKs fastest growing pay-as-you-go recharging network for EVs Charge Your Car (CYC) is a network of EV charge points located all.Step 4: Check your Gmail Advanced settings. Soft 404 errors are different from the usual 404 errors and can be harmful to your site.

What Is A 404 Error Message Code To Indicate

Similarly, just because a page says 404, doesnвЂ™t mean itвЂ™s returning a 404 status code.вЂќA soft 404 error occurs when a non-existent page (a page that has been deleted/removed) displays a вЂpage not foundвЂ™ message to anyone trying to access it but fails to return an HTTP 404 status code. Just because the name tag says itвЂ™s a dog, doesnвЂ™t mean itвЂ™s actually a dog. This informs both browsers and search engines that the page doesnвЂ™t exist.What most people donвЂ™t understand is that the content of the page вЂ“ вЂpage not foundвЂ™ message вЂ“ is entirely unrelated to the HTTP responseВ returned by the server.В 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.InВ GoogleвЂ™s own words:В вЂњ This is like a giraffe wearing a name tag that says вЂdogвЂ™. Why fixing soft 404 errors will help your websiteвЂ™s performanceA true 404 error message occurs when a websiteвЂ™s server returns an HTTP 404 standard response code to indicate that it couldnвЂ™t find the webpage ( URL ) that was requested by the user. In this article, we will cover:

This means that if your website has a high proportion of soft 404 errors, it can be harmful. The Problem With Soft 404 ErrorsIf your website returns an HTTP status code other than a 404 ( or 410) for a non-existent page, it can negatively impact the websiteвЂ™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, GoogleвЂ™s bots donвЂ™t spend time crawling or indexing the page. Crawling and indexing is a process GoogleвЂ™s bots go through before listing your websiteвЂ™s pages in search engine result pages.

This is based on how popular your pages are and how stale the content in GoogleвЂ™s index isGoogle doesnвЂ™t want to waste endless time crawling content on the same website, so it makes sense for them to assign a вЂbudgetвЂ™ to their web crawls before moving on to another website.Sticking with the idea of crawl budgets, if a website has a high proportion of soft 404 errors, then those pages will be crawled. Crawl Demand вЂ“ How much Google wants to crawl your pages. Crawl RateВ вЂ“ Designed to help Google not crawl your pages too frequently or too fast and hurt your server As a result, the URL youвЂ™ve deleted (with no content) will be crawled and indexed, thus wasting valuable crawl budget on redundant pages.Google defines Crawl Budget as вЂњ the number of URLs Googlebot can and wants to crawl.вЂќ Crawl Budget is split into Crawl Rate and Crawl Demand:

For this task, weвЂ™d take a look at the XML sitemap for the website in question вЂ“ which is a key indicator of how many pages a website has. This may well cause alarm bells to ring, but we first need to consider the figure in context.To do this, we need to check how many webpages on the website have been submitted to Google to crawl and index. In the example below, we see 147 soft 404 errors being reported for the website in question. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that when soft 404 errors are resolved, the performance of a website in organic search results tends to improve.To explain how youвЂ™d assess the extent of a soft 404 issue, letвЂ™s take a look at an example of a website that is displaying a number of soft 404 errors in Google Search Console. Because of the time Googlebot spends crawling soft 404s, your unique URLs may therefore not be discovered as quickly or crawled as frequently вЂ“ thus reducing the visibility of the important content on your site.Ultimately, if you have a high percentage of soft 404s, youвЂ™re not only wasting crawl budget on meaningless pages, but youвЂ™re also reducing the visibility of your important pages.

Once youвЂ™ve exported the list of URLs, youвЂ™ll need to assess why the pages are being reported as soft 404s. In the example above, there are under 1000 errors being reported, so these can be downloaded directly via Search Console. How Do I Resolve These Issues?Google only lets you export a maximum of 1000 URLs in Google Search Console. In this case, Google is spending too much time crawling URLs that simply donвЂ™t exist. Still, at over 3% of the siteвЂ™s total pages, the 107 soft 404 errors are still wasting some of the crawl budget assigned to this website.

Checked using: The other issue you might encounter when diagnosing the root cause of soft 404 errors, is inappropriate 301/302 redirects.301 redirects should be used when a page is permanently deleted and you want to send people to a new more appropriate page. However, there is no content on the page thatвЂ™s returned by the server.Page returning an HTTP 200 server response code. This is a prime example of a soft 404 error, as the HTTP response code is indicating to search engine robots that the page exists and should be crawled. Therefore, the first thing youвЂ™d need to do is run a selection of the soft 404 error pages through an HTTP status code checker such as httpstatus.io , to assess which status codes those pages are returning.LetвЂ™s say the example domain below was displaying a 404 page to the user trying to access it, but when we checked the response code using an HTTP status code checker, it returned an HTTP 200 response.

If a search engine robot follows those instructions, they will eventually be served an HTTP 200 (OK) status code for a page that displays a 404 error message, which is a whole other level of bad practice.An example of a 302 redirect being used to send users to a custom 404 error pageYou should never use redirects to serve a 404 error page. This will hugely impact how search engines crawl the website in question, as search engines are being instructed to look elsewhere for pages that have actually been deleted. In this case, the webmaster is using 302 redirects to redirect anyone trying to access a page thatвЂ™s been deleted, and redirecting those users to a custom 404 page вЂ“ one which doesnвЂ™t actually serve an HTTP 404 status code. If a direct replacement doesnвЂ™t exist then you should serve a custom 404 error page to display alternative options or products to the user.I have highlighted an example of inappropriate redirects triggering soft 404 errors below. Deleted pages or out of stock products should only be redirected to a direct replacement. ItвЂ™s important to highlight having 404s on your website isnвЂ™t a bad thing.

We discovered this was because their website was serving 404 messages without returning HTTP 404 status codes for many of their deleted products, of which there were thousands. We noticed the client in question had an extremely high proportion of soft 404 errors compared to the total number of pages on their site. Checked using: Will Solving Soft 404 Errors Increase Traffic to My Website?The results of a technical SEO project we once worked on for an e-commerce client made it very clear why you should always take note of soft 404 errors. This will prevent your website triggering a huge number of soft 404 errors and will ensure search engines only crawl and index the pages you want to rank.Page returning an HTTP 404 server response code.