Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Aswaty Sara on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 07/24/2014).

How to Fix Possible Outages Reported by Google Webmaster Forum?

Hi frnds...

I got the message in google webmaster forum about Possible Outages. I Don`t know how can i fix please help me.

http://sitename.com/: Possible outages

Dear owner or webmaster of http://sitename.com/

While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2014-06-27 07:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:

For more information, see our Help Center:

Soft 404 errors?
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Aswaty Saran: Hi frnds...

    I got the message in google webmaster forum about Possible Outages. I Don't know how can i fix please help me.

    http://sitename.com/: Possible outages

    Dear owner or webmaster of http://sitename.com/

    While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2014-06-27 07:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:

    For more information, see our Help Center:

    Soft 404 errors
  • Ryan Cramer: Check to see if Google Analytics (or the new Universal Analytics) is working properly on those pages. GWT says this about the soft 404 - "The target URL doesn't exist, but your server is not returning a 404 (file not found) error".  ;What that means is that a 404 is not being returned, but since there is no tracking code, they can't verify the page.

    I have a few pages set up like that purposely as it often contains personal information for the visitor and I want to avoid Google indexing these pages. Understanding how Google is truly tracking trillions of web pages a day, removing the analytics code is safer than a "noindex" meta tag in these cases.
  • Tony McCreath: A soft 404 can be a page with little content. The googlebot has recently seen a lot of them on your site and I think transient means they had content in the past.
  • Ryan Cramer: Google's response can be found at : ;https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2409439?hl=en
    Adding to my previous comment, it seems if there was a page that was previously indexed, and not is not returning anything on the Google Analytics, but no giving a 404 error, Google gets confused.

    If the soft 404 errors are not consistent, it may be that a server hosting CDNs like jQuery were not available to the client at the time, halting future javascript functions., so try moving your GA code before calling any other javascript code. And host the linked scripts on the same domain instead of using the CDNs
  • Tech Blog Corner: that means your server is down at the time google spiders are on your site to index
  • Aswaty Saran: Can you please explain me briefly??? what is the relation between the server and that error???

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 07/24/2014).

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