Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Soft 404 errors #91

Open
Qqkyu opened this issue Jan 17, 2022 · 0 comments
Open

Soft 404 errors #91

Qqkyu opened this issue Jan 17, 2022 · 0 comments

Comments

@Qqkyu
Copy link

Qqkyu commented Jan 17, 2022

Description
App returns "soft 404" errors for missing pages. A soft 404 is a URL that returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist and also a 200 (success) status code. It returns a page with little content, namely a menu bar, and items.
Returning a success status code rather than 404 (not found) is a bad practice. A success status code tells search engines that there's a real page at that URL. As a result, the page may be listed in search results, and search engines will continue trying to crawl that non-existent URL instead of spending time crawling real pages.

https://app.moneytracker.cc/broken/url returns following page:
soft 404

Steps to reproduce

  1. Go to https://app.moneytracker.cc/broken/url
  2. Create account and proceed if needed
  3. Above site image shows up

Fix ideas

  • Return a 404 (not found) or 410 (home) response (status) for the page. These status codes indicate to search engines that the page doesn't exist and the content should not be indexed
  • Make these error pages useful to users by customizing them, custom 404 page should help people find the information they're looking for
  • Tell visitors clearly that the page they're looking for can't be found
  • Make sure the 404 page has the same look and feel (including navigation) as the rest of the app
  • Consider adding a link to the site's home page

Reference
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/soft-404-errors?visit_id=637772503729817225-2301542019&rd=1

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

1 participant