Submitted URL seems to be a Soft 404

[Craig Bird]

Good morning all, I am getting a message that I have 1 issue in Google Search Console relating to one of our pages (https://cloudtech24.com/page-404-custom/) that informs me "Submitted URL seems to be a Soft 404" Does this affect my SEO, and if so how do i resolve this?

 

[Tin]

A Soft 404' error occurs when a non-existent page (a page that has been deleted/removed) displays a 'page not found' message in the persons browser to anyone trying to access it, but fails to return a HTTP 404 status code.

If you go here https://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php and in that white box enter the url of your page in it (the url above) click 'submit' and it'll tell you that the url gives a http code of 200 (which means that the url is "found"), the browser is seeing a 'live page' so it's not an actual 404 page.

It's an easy fix so ask your web guy to sort it for you. Hope that helps.

 

[gpietersz]

You can check it in your web browser.

Both Firefox and Chrome have developer tools that let you see request and response headers.

Its not a critical issue and probably will not impact SEO as Google has recognised its a soft 404. On the other hand its better to send a real 404 and it should be an easy issue to fix so you might as well do it.

 

[Jason Potterfield]

A soft 404 URL indicates that the page does not exist and also returns a 200 level success code. The big issue is that returning a success code for a page other than 404 (not found) page is a bad practise. The success code tells search engine that there's a real page at that URL.

If your page has moved or has a replacement, the best thing would be to use a permanent 301 redirection.

 

[Mansi Rana]

If a page showing 404 in search console it means that page does not exist at the moment...

In order to fix it, find a relevant page of that 404 pages and apply 301 redirection.

 

[Craig Bird]

Thank you for your responses, as all links are reviewed and its not a store where we remove products constantly - I am going to remove this!!!!