hi friends i had received a message in Google webmaster tools that is showing the following error: /Dear owner or webmaster of http://www.example.com / While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2010-09-13 10:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors: • http://www.example.com / url1 • http://www.example.com / url2 • http://www.example.com / url3 • http://www.example.com / url4 For more information, see our Help Center: Soft 404 errors/ Please help regarding the error what it is? why it is? an how can it be rectified? what are soft 404 errors. Please help, am in trouble. i think,
Read this- http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/06/crawl-errors-now-reports-soft-404s.html here is copied content Here’s a list of steps to correct soft 404s to help both Google and your users: If you did some google search, then you could get its answer- http://www.google.co.in/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=webmaster+tool+soft+404+errors
Hey guys really thanks for the answers, but i want to know the reason behind this. Ehy google wemaster tools is showing such message and what the mistake or error am doing in my website? or is there any other reason behind this?. please explain me clearly. HOW TO RECTIFY THIS
It means that the page listed can not be found by the google bots. Just click on the links from your account and see where it takes you. If it can be found then you should be ok. Webmaster tool kindda slow to update though
A "soft 404" occurs when a webserver responds with a 200 OK HTTP response code for a page that doesn't exist rather than the appropriate 404 Not Found. I think you need to make to proper 301 redirect for those 404 error urls.
hey thanks buddy but google send the the few sample urls only and i don't know what else urls are there and how many. The 301 redirect looks ok but should i redirect them to home page. And moreover i need to know why it is so?
Hi tony, i checked by clicking the links, it takes me either to home page or some other product page of my website, the page is founf but some other random oage, so i think it is not ok. So how should i proceed further.
Do you mind sharing your site's URL? It used to happen a lot with Joomla sites and is very common with custom CMS that ignore 404 errors and generate 'blank pages' (with header footer but without content) for every query.