Spammy links don’t cause soft-404 error: Google

Do you have 404 errors in your Google Search Console reports or in Google Analytics? Take a deep breath and try not to be alarmed and panic. Some 404 errors are perfectly acceptable and have no detrimental impact on SEO. However, some 404 problems must be rectified in order to prevent 404 errors from harming your SEO.

404 error, also known as a not found error, occurs when the page you were seeking for cannot be located and is returned to your computer or device for display. 404 errors can be produced by a variety of factors, but according to Google’s John Mueller, “Soft 404 failures in Google Search Console are not caused by spammy links to your site.” 

Now in order to understand this, we need to dive deep. A soft 404 error is basically a URL that produces a page which informs the user that the page does not exist as well as the status code 200 (a response code). It might be a page with little or no content in some situations. On the other hand, spammy backlinks, as the name implies, are low-quality connections that might harm your website’s rankings. These links might lead to sites that are irrelevant, have little or no content, or worse, duplicate material but not to 404 error. 

If your 404 handling isn’t done correctly, and someone publishes several such fake or bogus links to your domain name but not to genuine URLs on your site, that is when you land on 404 soft error. When Googlebot tries to visit such URLs, it encounters a soft 404 rather than a true 404. However, you should provide actual 404 errors for URLs that do not exist on your site; you should not be sending 200 status codes, but rather 404s.

The page and its contents are still available. It’s probable that a decent website was marked with a soft 404 error because it didn’t load correctly for Googlebot or because it was missing essential resources during rendering. Examine the displayed content and the returned HTTP code using the URL Inspection tool. After some cleaning up a large-scale spam infestation on a website, Google Bots end up inadvertently crashing it. 

It’s bad practise to return a success response code instead of 404 (not found), 410 (gone), or 301 (permanent redirect). A success status code informs search engines that the URL is for a legitimate page. As a result, the page may appear in search results, and search engines will continue to try to crawl that non-existent URL rather than your actual sites. When Google’s algorithms determine that the page is truly an error page based on its content, the site’s Index Coverage report will show a soft 404 error.