How to remove soft 404 in WMT

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How to remove soft 404 in WMT

meelosh

7:19 am on Mar 2, 2016 (gmt 0)

I recently had google WMT report on an increase in soft 404 pages. these were all search pages (example.com/search/page/211) and there were 211 of them. I have since then blocked all search pages in robots text and when i go into WMT and try fetch them they come up as "blocked". How ever these soft 404's have now stayed in the WMT for a few months. Do i just go and mark them as fixed or is there something else I should be doing?

thanks

meelosh

10:58 am on Mar 2, 2016 (gmt 0)

in addition these pages are all automatically noindex follow

not2easy

3:22 pm on Mar 2, 2016 (gmt 0)

I would just mark them "Fixed" and see if any new Soft 404s are reported.

meelosh

10:56 am on Mar 3, 2016 (gmt 0)

thank you not2easy

not2easy

3:57 pm on Mar 3, 2016 (gmt 0)

When you say that these pages are all automatically "noindex" and you have blocked crawling, the order of things can make a difference. Were the pages always "noindex" or was that done after the Soft 404s showed up? Were these URLs always blocked in robots.txt or was that as a result of the Soft 404s? Using robots.txt would prevent Google from knowing they are noindexed if they were not previously using that attribute.

If you have a way to use "noindex,noarchive" that would be better for search results pages. The "follow" directive is a default and all links are followed if they do not have "nofollow" as a meta tag or as a "rel=nofollow" attribute on the anchor. So if the URLs were not "noindex" previously, Google would need to crawl the URLs to see that they are now "noindex".

meelosh

5:32 am on Mar 4, 2016 (gmt 0)

thanks for that.....these pages have always been noindex follow even before i blocked with robots txt.....