Posted by on July 12th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in SEO - Search Engine Optimization |
The whole business of search engine optimization is based on the volume of customer traffic that you direct to your website. This in turn scores your homepage points in the list of search engines and their crawlers resulting in higher places in the search engine rankings. Through the years, though, the whole SEO landscape has developed a lot and with this comes several distraction like spam and erroneous 404 reporting, among others.
Google addresses this by their introduction of the Webmaster tools. Just recently, they upgraded their service so that users will be able to receive better 404 reporting. A bad 404 reporting is otherwise known as a soft 404. 404 is a response code usually given by web crawlers to indicate that a website does not exist given a URL. A soft 404 happens when a non-existent website is recognized as existing by a web crawler when in fact it does not. Crawlers usually give a 200 code response for pages found successfully. With the soft 404, a site that has already changed URLs or simply does not exist anymore is still given a 200 code.
Instead of a web page together with its contents, users are given a page that says the page does not exist anymore but is still recognized by the crawler. This can pose the problem of significant customer traffic being directed to that non-existent URL instead of the site’s latest one.
Google upgraded their Webmasters tool and gave their users a chance to filter these soft 404s themselves. Eliminating 404s are easy and important in the success of your whole SEO strategy. Here are some tips that Google has for webmasters to decrease their soft 404 occurrence:
