SEO Problem: Soft 404 errors
This happens more often than you'd expect. A user will not notice anything different, but search engine crawlers sure do.
A soft 404 is a page that looks like a 404 but returns a HTTP status code 200. In this instance, the user sees some text along the lines of "Sorry the page you requested cannot be found." But behind the scenes, a code 200 is telling search engines that the page is working correctly. This disconnect can cause problems with pages being crawled and indexed when you do not want them to be.
A soft 404 also means you cannot spot real broken pages and identify areas of your website where users are receiving a bad experience. From a link building perspective (I had to mention it somewhere!), neither solution is a good option. You may have incoming links to broken URLs, but the links will be hard to track down and redirect to the correct page.
How to solve:
Fortunately, this is a relatively simply fix for a developer who can set the page to return a 404 status code instead of a 200. Whilst you're there, you can have some fun and make a cool 404 page for your user's enjoyment. Here are some examples of awesome 404 pages, and I have to point to Distilled's own page here
To find soft 404s, you can use the feature in Google Webmaster Tools which will tell you about the ones Google has detected:
You can also perform a manual check by going to a broken URL on your site (such as www.example.com/5435fdfdfd) and seeing what status code you get. A tool I really like for checking the status code is Web Sniffer, or you can use the Ayima tool if you use Google Chrome.
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