: How do I do an htaccess rewrite on an internal URL without Google crawl giving me a soft 404 error? Here is my issue. I have a rewrite rule in my htaccess like this: RewriteRule ^(news|review|feature|editorial|podcast)/

@Jamie184

I can't see how your original internal rewrite would have anything to do with the soft-404 reported by Google. Google is not aware of any rewrite - this is entirely hidden from users, bots and Google.

And changing this to a 301 redirect is only going to make matters a whole lot worse I suspect. Presumably, you are linking to the "pretty" URL (ie. /feature/13889/negative-world-2017-goty-awards)?

A soft-404 is generally reported when Google is served a page that looks like a "Not Found" error, or the page is very thin on content, and which responds with a 200 OK status. From the Google help docs on Soft 404 errors:


A soft 404 means that a URL on your site returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist and also a 200-level (success) code to the browser. (In some cases, instead of a "not found" page, it might be a page with little or no usable content--for example, a sparsely populated or empty page.)


So, whether you serve the page from the "pretty" URL /feature/13889/negative-world-2017-goty-awards or the "ugly" URL /article.php?id=13889 (via a 301 redirect or direct link) then it's still the same page and so still the same soft-404.


would this explain why this stuff isn't being indexed anymore


Google is unlikely going to index a page that it considers to be a (soft) 404.


I'm a little worried because when I do "fetch as Google" it just says "redirected".


I would remove the redirect and redo the "fetch as Google" check. What is Google seeing? Maybe it's getting a different response than what users are seeing?

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