: In Google webmaster tools, can a "soft 404" be triggered by the text on the page? I just ran across an error in Google Webmaster Tools that I have never seen before. I manage the website

@Heady270

It does appear that Google is calling this page a "soft 404" based on the text on this page and lack of other content. I updated the page by scheduling new performances. Google Webmaster Tools is now no longer classifying this page as a soft 404:

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@Sims2060225

It appears that URL is a non-www version, I would recommend using an external rewrite to force the www version. It may be the case that your site is in fact duplicated in Google's eyes, and they are seeing the non-www version as duplicate. Try requesting the same page with both www and without it, if you are getting a result, you are showing Google duplicates. You would also want to check for any internal linking to non-www version's of any pages, and manually correct those links to include the

Note: I would also like to see the linked from tab on that screen. Try crawling that page as Googlebot, and post results. I have seen Google do some silly things in GWMT with URL's. The more information, the better.

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@YK1175434

Here's a source from "soft 404" are explained.

Excerpt:


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. Soft 404s can limit a site's crawl coverage
by search engines because these duplicate URLs may be crawled instead
of pages with unique content.


I think Googlebot considers your page as duplicate with another one (most probably because the content is very thin in your page). That's why Google doesn't spend time to index your page (like he does with duplicate content pages). Moreover, I don't think Googlebot can understand what your sentence in the page means.

In that case, Google advises to apply a 301 redirect to another page or apply a 404 or 410 HTTP response.

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@Hamm4606531

Here’s a list of steps to correct soft 404s to help both Googlebot and your users:



For the soft 404s, determine whether the URL:


Contains the correct content and properly returns a 200 response (not actually a soft 404)
Should 301 redirect to a more accurate URL
Doesn’t exist and should return a 404 or 410 response

Confirm that you’ve configured the proper HTTP Response by using Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools
If you now return 404s, you may want to customize your 404 page to aid your users. custom 404 widget can help.



Hope this link from Google will give more details.

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