Team Lead SEO Interview Question:

Tell me what is the difference between soft 404 and 404 errors? How will you find and remove these errors?

Submitted by: Muhammad

A 404 error is returned when the browser requests a resource from the web server and the server is unable to find that resource so it returns 404 file not found error. On the other hand, soft 404 error is returned when the browser requests a resource from the web server and the server returns 200 OK response for a file that does not exist on the server. Hence, in both the cases, file is not present on the server but in case of soft 404 the server returns 200 OK response code by mistake. We can find out these errors with the help of Google Webmasters Tool and we can either remove them by adding proper redirects and by creating a custom 404 page for helping the user in proper navigation while browsing the site.
Submitted by: Muhammad