Submitted URL seems to be a soft 404 – is it a thin content issue?

Hi everyone, and thanks for joining me again. So I logged into my Google search console and I found that the submitted URL seems to be a soft 404. Okay. So what does that mean and how do I fix it?

First check Robots.TXT

First there’s a few different things that can trigger a soft 404. So in this video we’re just talking about one specifically. But you know, there are other issues and I’ll link to some resources in case the issue that’s causing your soft 404 is not the same as mine, but basically I’ll, I’ll click on this to see the URL and question. And okay, submitted URL seems to be a soft 404. So here’s the URL that’s causing it. So I’m going to click on this. And first I’m going to click on test robots.TXT blocking just to make sure that there’s not anything blocking the search engine.

So I can see here with Google bot, it’s allowed, if you see that you’re probably in good shape like I am. Okay, so it’s not the robot.TXT, that’s the issue.

Inspect the URL

So if I go back here, I’m going to click on inspect URL and it’s going to receive the data, retrieve the data from Google for me. Okay. So URL is not in Google indexing error errors. And then we scroll down here, we see failed at soft 404, so okay. It is in fact do you mean this a soft 404. So the next thing I’m going to do is I’m actually going to take a look at my page cause I have an inkling, whoops, not that that’s the site map URL. I need the URL of the actual page, which is right up here.

So I’m going to take a look at this page and open a new tab cause I’m going to share some of these links for you all and let me look at it.

Thin Content Issue

Okay. I can see here that there is not any content on the page. So it says that there’s, you know, don’t have any events scheduled but what Google is probably giving this a soft 404 the reason is because a of a thing, content issue.

I’ll post a link to an article about thin content, but likely if Google doesn’t think that there’s any value to the user of a page because there’s not really any content on the page and there’s consistently not content, then that’s going to probably trigger the soft 404. Because there’s thin content, meaning not really any content, not really any valuable content. So the way to fix my issue would be that I need to add content to this page that’s valuable to people who are visiting my store’s website. And that’s how I can resolve my soft 404.

In this instance. Again, there are other reasons that someone would that your website might trigger a software form. So this may not be the reason or solution for you, but I’ll post the link to some articles that show you other reasons that you may see a soft 404 triggered in your Google search console.

That’s it!

Thanks for checking out the video and I hope if this is issue that you’re having that this helps.