Question

Hi folks, I've been plagued by a question these past couple of days and haven't been able to find a definitive answer to it. Hope you guys can shed some light on this and clear my confusion. Please bear with me and forgive me if I sound like a nagging book of questions. Here goes: What is the primary difference between returning a 404 code from your website V/S redirecting to a custom 404 page. Which is more advisable from the perspective of SEO and why? Also, which of the two should I be concerned about, soft 404 and 404 not found? Lastly, should I be even bothering with a 404 when I can simply 410 a URL and remove from my sitemap?  

Answer 1

404 on /this-specific-page-path vs 404 on /page-not-found in GA reports. Easier to «debug». You should try to minimize any exposure of 404s. It’s bad UX. And of course remove bad locations from xml sitemap. If you don’t plan to 301 then 410 will speed up removal from search engine indexes.  

Answer 2

"What is the primary difference between returning a 404 code from your website V/S redirecting to a custom 404 page" The original idea was to give the Website owner the ability to define a non-indexable document that served as the "custom 404 document". The Web server simply displays that document for any URL request that cannot be resolved. Search engines honored that request. Content Management Systems (CMSes) gave developers the ability to customize the custom document page. But for some reason these CMSes serve these documents with 200 status codes instead of 404 status codes. So the search engines classified these pages as "soft 404s", ignoring them much as they ignore "hard 404s". Once Google decides you're serving soft 404s it may be polite and send you a notice or warning via Google Search Console but you can safely assume those URLs won't be used for anything.  

Answer 3

And for your last point, if you are sure those pages don't exist and any page that errors really will no longer exist, then go for the 410. Bur If a dead page did/does have rankings, 301 it to a current 200 page.