Google Search Console reports a Soft 404

I was having success in handling pages that I had removed from my server. I think that I may have triggered Soft 404's due to something I did on the server.

The Google help does not really help here.

Looking around on the Internet there also seems to be "mixed messages". The seroundtable.com article makes more sense but bear in mind that this was from 2009. Things have probably changed since then????

In any case Google was not reporting soft 404's for pages that I had removed and I was using the same Custom 404 page.

Also the Google help about a 404 page that did not have content, such as navigation to other parts of the website to assist the visitor getting a "Not Found", was not the case.

Update - October 2023 - Google have sent me an emial saying that there are a number of pages that are generating soft 404s. While it is true that I have deleted a few pages from the server I also asked for them to be removed from the Google index and I added a NOINDEX Meta tag.

What I didn't do, in all cases was to check that I had removed the URL from the sitemap and GoogleBot may have tried to index the pages and found that they were not there. I have now checked the sitemap for entries of pages that I did not want indexed.

Cause and Effect

I am a great believer in making a single change at a time and then seeing what the effect is. When too many changes are made in response to a percieved problem and the problem either gets fixed or remains it is difficult to determine was was effective and what was not.

In the case of the Soft 404 errors appearing it was after I had made a change to prevent Impressions for pages that I no longer cared were indexed. These pages I had placed in an archive folder on my server. These pages related to content from my Canadian site that I had determined that I would probably want to drop sometime in the future.

What I did was to rename the archive folder on the server as a way of generating 404 errors for those that tried to access these pages. Some of these pages were in the Google index as I was seeing impressions for them in GSC.

Update - October 2023 - What I hadn't done was to check that these archived pages were not in the sitemap.

Returning a 404 in .htaccess

While I have not seen this documented I added a Redirect 404 /no_find.html to my .htaccess file for the 404 page.

If I try to re-direct the no_find to my home page, as suggested in many posts that I found when making a search for this problem, it causes a server error when a page is accessed that does not exist. Both additions cause a server error.