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A friend of mine has been having trouble getting her site indexed by google and asked me to have a look, but that is not something I really know much about and was hoping for some assistance.
Looking at her search console, google crawl shows an error of soft-404 on the index page. I marked this as fixed a few times, because the site looks fine to me but it keeps coming back.
If I fetch the site as google it seems to be working fine, although it is showing the mobile version instead of the desktop.
It keeps giving another reoccurring 404 of a page http://www.smeyan.com/new-page, which doesn't exist anywhere I can see including server files or sitemaps.
Here is what I know about this site:
It used to be a wix site and was moved to a host gator shared server 2-3 months ago.
It's using JavaScript/jQuery .load to get page content outside the index.html template.
It has 2 sitemaps one for the URLs and one for both URLs and images http://www.smeyan.com/sitemap_url.xml http://www.smeyan.com/sitemap.xml
It has been about 2 months since it was submitted for indexing and google has not indexed any of the content when you search for site:www.smeyan.com it shows some old stuff from the wix server. Although search console says it has 172 images indexed.
it has www. as a preference set in search console.
Has anyone experienced this and has an direction for a fix?
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A soft 404 error happens when the server sends a 200 OK status for the requested page, but Google thinks that the page should return a 404. It may do this if the page content looks like an error, or, if there's no content.
The Problem With Soft 404 Errors If your website returns an HTTP status code other than a 404 (or 410) for a non-existent page, it can negatively impact the website's performance in organic search. This means that if your website has a high proportion of soft 404 errors, it can be harmful.
“A soft 404 means that a URL on your site returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist and also a 200-level (success) code to the browser.” Basically, you've got a page on your site telling visitors that it no longer exists, but at the same time, it's telling search engines that it does exist.
How long time was set for this site in Cache-Control header? If long, you should use "google removals" for obsolete snippets and cache. I simulated Google visit on your webpage. Correct 404 return code. Correct headers. Thus. Report google removals for "not found" pages. You must request visit of Googlebot and keep calm and wait for reaction.
BTW: For permanently removed content use 410 Gone for Google or... report via Removals. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en
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