Google Removed A Soft 404 Classifier To Fix Some Deindexing Bugs

Jul 23, 2021 - 7:56 am 2 by

Google Broken Links

Google's John Mueller said this morning that the Google Search team has removed a classifier it was using to determine soft 404s. As a reminder, a ton of sites were complaining about pages being deindexed and noticed a spike in soft 404s reported by Google Search Console.

This was due to a change Google made to its soft 404 classifiers. Google removed one of those classifiers this week and John Mueller said you should start to potentially see the soft 404s drop back down and those pages go back into the index in days or a week or so.

This came up in this morning's video at the 16:30 mark where Eliot Koey said his client got deindexed and Google Search Console said it is a soft 404.

John Mueller of Google explained that Google tries to recognize soft 404s manually. But he then he said "we saw a bunch of these reports recently, in the past couple of weeks, and the team has been looking into that, and I think they turned one of classifiers off now based on some of the feedback that we got. So I would suspect that maybe this will catch up again and work out in the next couple of days and week or so."

Hat tip to Glenn Gabe for spotting this:

Here is the video embed:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: Google also confirmed the fix on Twitter later today:

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Follow

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Google Ads

Google Ads Suspended 90% More Advertisers This Year & Removed 5.5 Billion Ads

Mar 28, 2024 - 7:51 am
Google Ads

Google Updates Its Definition Of Top Ads; They May Not Be At The Top

Mar 28, 2024 - 7:41 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Adds Share Ad Preview For Performance Max

Mar 28, 2024 - 7:31 am
Google

Google Can Search For Your Blockchain Wallet Addresses (Bitcoin & More)

Mar 28, 2024 - 7:21 am
Google Maps

New Google Shopping & Maps Search Features

Mar 28, 2024 - 7:11 am
Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: March 27, 2024

Mar 27, 2024 - 4:00 pm
Previous Story: Google Shows Which Ranking Factors Resulted In A Page Ranking