SEO Information from Internet Marketing Professional, Hari Krishna D

I have observed Soft 404s ‎in my Google webmaster Central under Crawl Errors. And then read the post on "Crawl Errors now reports soft 404s".

A brief on Soft 404s:

Some websites report a "not found" error by returning a standard web page with a "200 OK" response code; this is called a soft 404. Soft 404s are problematic for automated methods of discovering whether a link is broken. Soft 404s can occur as a result of configuration errors when using certain HTTP server software, for example with the Apache software, when an Error Document 404 (specified in a .htaccess file) is specified as an absolute path (e.g. http://example.com/error.html) rather than a relative path (/error.html).

Other search engines, like Yahoo, use automated processes to detect soft 404 errors.

Here’s a list of steps to correct soft 404s to help both Google and your users:

1. Check whether you have soft 404s listed in Webmaster Tools

2. For the soft 404s, determine whether the URL:

       A. Contains the correct content and properly returns a 200 response (not actually a soft 404)

       B. Should 301 redirect to a more accurate URL

       C. Doesn’t exist and should return a 404 or 410 response

3. Confirm that you’ve configured the proper HTTP Response by using Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools

4. If you now return 404s, you may want to customize your 404 page to aid your users.
 
Contact me if you want help on how to set up .htaccess.