Fix Soft 404 Indexing Error

In this blog, you going to learn what is this Soft 404 error for Google and how to fix this issue to let Google index the URL.

What is Soft 404

Google expalined here that a Soft 404 page that exist on the intenet but seems broken or blank page. So Google assume and push that URL into a Soft 404 error category.

To give better user experience, Google exlude these types of URLs from their search results.

Good thing is, you can console these URL into your Google Search Console Dashboard and fix them.

Inspect URL in Live

First step is to inspect that URL in Live to see what is this look like to google when render that page.

1. Go to Pages.
2. Select the Soft 404 row from the table.
3. Hover over the link, and you will see a search icon.
4. Click on the Search Icon to inspect the URL.
5. Finally, click on the Test Live URL button.

1. Now, click on the Request Indexing button.
2. If the URL is indexed, then there is no problem, and the URL can be indexed.

Avoid this Soft 404 error

What I notice in Soft 404 URLs is that all these URLs have slugs containing certain words that Google detects and categorizes as Soft 404.

1. error
2. not found

How to fix

There are two ways, according to me: one is to request indexing again, and the second is to rename the URL slugs.

If there are many URLs and you can't re-index them manually, use our tool to put these URLs on autopilot.

We built a tool to index URLs faster called URL Index.

Here is YouTube Video to learn more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLdECAImNso

That's all