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This article shares an SEO problem, soft 404. A status code we often see on websites is 404. Whether we develop a website or not, this is a problem we have to face.

What is a soft 404?

Before talking about soft 404, we must first understand what 404 is. 404 is an HTTP status code , which means that the page is not found. In simple terms, when we visit a web page, if the URL we requested does not have a corresponding resource, the website will return us "404 Page Not Found".

HTTP is not the purpose of this article. You can check the HTTP tutorial to learn more about HTTP basics.

By default, if we visit a non-existent link, the web server will return us a page like the one above (Nginx). However, if we are a website operator, we will find that directly returning this page to users will definitely reduce the quality of our website.

In view of this, we usually define a 404 page ourselves. The 404 page of my own website looks like this.

Visit https://www.jiyik.com/a.html

Soft 404

That’s all we have to say about 404. Now let’s mainly talk about soft 404. When I first started building a website, I didn’t understand the concept of soft 404. At first, I just wanted to customize the 404 page to improve the user experience. But there is a problem that I didn’t notice. If it is purely static, you can directly configure your own 404 page through web services such as Ningx or Apache. There is no problem with this. But if it is a dynamic page, we need to determine in the code whether the resource requested by the user exists. If it does not exist, we directly render a 404 page through the template engine. Let’s take a quick look at the code.

if (count($res) <= 0) {
    $this->displayError("404");
    return;
}

Here I access a tutorial content that does not exist, and a 404 page is returned

So here comes the problem. Here we return a 404 page to the user, but the HTTP status code we give is 200. Although the user does not feel anything, for SEO, search engines will think that you are cheating. (Actually, I am a SEO rookie, I really don't mean to deceive you)

The above situation is the protagonist we are going to introduce today, soft 404. The so-called soft 404 means that a 404 page is displayed to the user, but the actual HTTP status code is 200.

So to solve the problem of soft 404, it is actually very simple. Just return a 404 page to the user and change the response status code to 404 or 410. This depends on the programming language used for your website. However, no matter what language it is, the core is still the HTTP protocol.

For PHP, it is actually quite simple. You can headermodify the response status code by

header("status: 404 Not Found");

After the modification, when requesting the same address again, the custom 404 page is returned and the status code also becomes 404.

Summarize

Developing and maintaining a website is not easy. If it is just developed, it is not a difficult task for a programmer. But many details need us to do them carefully. I am a developer, and I am really a novice in SEO. I will learn and modify it while doing it. If you are not a developer, if you want to build a good website, whether it is using CMS or other frameworks, you hope to understand the HTTP protocol. Now we have entered the era of HTTP2.0. If you are interested, you can also learn about the past and present of HTTP2 and the shortcomings of HTTP1.1

Recommended reading:

• HTTP Tutorial
• HTTP2 Functional Upgrade