Soft 404s Explained
You may have already heard of 404 errors that display a ‘page not found’ message to visitors. But have you heard of a soft 404? These are common. But a failure to fix them could have a disastrous impact on your SEO strategy. So let’s find out more to avoid getting pushed down the Google search engine results pages.
What are the Differences Between 404s and Soft 404s?
The difference between these two error notifications is actually very simple. With a hard 404 error, the 404 error code is returned to both page visitors and search engines. So importantly, Google knows this page doesn’t exist and won’t try to index it or rank it. With a soft 404 error, however, the 404 error code is displayed to visitors but not to search engines, meaning the page will continue to be crawled until you take action.
Are 404s Bad for SEO?
If you’re looking to clue up on SEO for accountants or any other industry, it’s important to understand that soft 404s can be bad for business as they have the potential to impact site ranking. The most obvious issue is that they cause a poor user experience. If a visitor to your site is constantly presented with pages that won’t open, they’re likely to leave quickly, thereby reducing the ‘dwell time’ on your site and indicating to Google that your content isn’t of a high quality. This can impact your SEO efforts.
404s can also slow website speed and performance. Considering these are now ranking factors, Google might consider a site with many 404s and poor download speeds as one they don’t want to present for searches. Soft 404s can also eat into your ‘crawl budget’ and prevent other pages from being crawled. Google uses the crawl budget to determine how much and how often to crawl a site. So if you’ve 100 pages, but Google decides your crawl budget is 70, then Google will only crawl 70 pages. If some of those pages have soft 404 errors then valuable pages may get missed by the bots.
How Do I Fix a Soft 404?
Google Search Console is specifically designed to help ‘fix issues’ and can help websites for accountants to rank based on certain criteria. This tool is specifically good at helping you to fix soft 404 errors. Notifications about these errors can be found under ‘Coverage’ and the soft 404s that appear with an ‘error’ status should be targeted first. If the page is necessary and you want to keep it, it might have simply been flagged due to a lack of content. So you can try to create a more informative and well-optimised page to see if that can be reindexed properly. If a web page needs bulking out, you can also think about adding charts, images, diagrams and more.
If you’re looking for a website design for chartered accountants that takes into account SEO optimisation, contact Whitefish Marketing today.
