: How to fix "Soft 404" to firm 200 OK? Some of the web-pages on my site are very slim. I've recently noticed that Google appears to qualify such pages as "Soft 404": The target URL

@LarsenBagley505

I want to point out that a page can be declared as a soft-404 if the text in it suggests that it is an error page regardless of the amount of quality images or template surrounding it. For example, if your page contains text such as:

"The page you are requesting could not be found"

or even:

"The page you are requesting is currently not available"

Then it can send a signal to search engines that the status is a soft-404.

As others have mentioned, you want to create a quality page rich in text that people can understand without using any shady techniques and add some hyperlinks to other sections of your website to make the web page more real and more user friendly.

Try to make any text about the page the least negative as possible. For example, if something is upcoming, you may want to add the following:

"In about (insert time frame here) from now, we will be having (insert future event name here). In the meantime we have info about (insert current event name here). (insert blank lines and description of event here)"

instead of this:

"The page about (insert future event name here) could not be found"

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@Chiappetta492

Google doesn't want to waste its resource crawling pages that appear to not add values, so when it comes across to a page that look like an error page, Google gives a soft 404 error warning to let you know the page will not be treated like a normal page anymore unless you fix it.

Few examples of when soft 404 happens


content on a page is an error page yet it is showing status code 200
content on a page is minimal and looks like an error page
content on a page is irrelevant to the original page (when a redirect is in place) - especially when do a catch all redirect to the home page


The first thing I notice of the page you gave is that there is no description in the content as to what the page is about.

I am not technical enough to understand the information on the page so if I got to the page for the first time, I would likely either just close the page or hit the back button on the browser.

When I checked on the important SEO elements,


the title doesn't mean anything to people who are not technical enough to understand
no meta description
very little content


Adding more content and description would be the best solution.

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@Eichhorn148

Your pages don't look like very good landing pages. Whether or not Google identifies them as "soft 404", I wouldn't think Google would want to include them in their search index.

The questions I would have when I land on these pages would be:


Why is this page so plain looking?
What is this site, who runs it, is their information credible?
What information can I get from this page that I can't get from the software's official website?
Do I have any options to get the info I need other than clicking back to the SERPs or clicking to the official site?


Your other question lists several reasons that Google may think this pages is a soft 404. There would be several other reasons that it may not appeal to users:


The purpose of the page is not apparent
There is no call to action. Do you want people to download this software, install BSD, click to the official pages, or something else?
There are a lot of technical terms and navigation on your site that are likely to confuse users. Directory paths, version numbers, source control system abbreviations.


My suggestions to you would be:


Use your site name in a heading, not just in the page title
Use a site logo on every page
Your site is not a subdirectory of /usr/ why are you making the navigation appear that it is?
The fact that www is a category isn't immediately apparent. You should say it is the category at the top of the page (like you do at the bottom) or use more familiar breadcrumb navigation "ports.se > BSD software > www > Apache > apache-httpd-openbsd"
Describe what the page and site are supposed to do, maybe something like "Browse and compare the software that ships with BSD. View the software package dependencies"
Use something other than a white background, black text, and blue links. Anything really.
Take version numbers out of the headers. "OpenBSD improved and secured version of Apache" is a good header and smaller below it could be (with more description): "Package name and version: apache-httpd-openbsd-1.3.20140502p2"
Describe your navigation links "CVSWeb" and "allbsd" are rather opaque. What are they? How are they related? Why would I want to click on them?
Get some more content. Can you review these packages? Allow others to review them? At least link to reviews or ratings?

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