First of all, what is 404 and soft 404
404: Simply put, when the user enters a non-existent page link, the returned page will be represented by a 404 code.
Soft 404: Soft 404 is when the page visited by the user does not exist, it returns not a 404 error code, but a 200 code. Guide users to continue to visit the website.
Then I think everyone has seen the difference between them:
404: Return to the user the 404 error page, and the HTTP status code is 404;
Soft 404: Return to the user the error prompt page, the status code is 200;
So under what circumstances will soft 404 appear?
Generally, we are divided into:
1: Server configuration error;
2: An error occurred in the website program or template;
3: The website is caused by malicious attacks;
4: Caused by a website administrator's mistake.
How to deal with soft 404, at this time we can use robots.txt file or nofollow to prevent crawlers from crawling pages that you don't want to crawl. For ordinary users, Soft 404 will inevitably lead to a high bounce rate on the page. So, in order to achieve a better user experience, we can appropriately modify the error prompt page of Soft 404 instead of returning to the system default page or even the homepage of the website.