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    4. Increase in Soft 404s due to Custom 404 page?

    Increase in Soft 404s due to Custom 404 page?

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    • vtmoz
      vtmoz last edited by

      Hi all,

      We have noticed recently soft 404s are increasing day by day; which are landing on our custom 404 page created a month back.

      Other 404 pages are NOT landing on custom 404 page. Does this custom 404 page hurting us by causing an increase in soft 404s?

      Our CMS is WordPress.

      Thanks

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • sarahwalsh
        sarahwalsh last edited by

        If you have a sharp increase in 404, page-not-found errors this can massively impact your business's organic SEO in a negative way.

        It can also make shoppers annoyed that they can't get to the page where they want to buy that product.

        We had this problem with a business that sells garden buildings, and it damaged the company's organic Seo.

        thats because they had so many 404 errors, we fixed the on-page seo, and then the organic and local seo improved.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • evolvingSEO
          evolvingSEO last edited by

          Hello!

          You should check the actual status code of your custom 404 page - does it actually return a 404 Not Found?

          You can check in a variety of places:

          • https://urivalet.com/
          • https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch

          Or install the Redirect Path plugin and it will show the status code in your browser.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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