Soft 404 errors from Google Search Console and excessive filters

Technical Q&A
1

Hi Community, I am reaching out to see if anyone might be able to help. Using Google Search Console’s indexing reporting we identified several pages that are serving a soft 404 code meaning that the page is serving a 200OK and 4XX code simultaneously.

We are unable to figure out where these pages are living in the Shopify store backend so that we can delete these pages and institute a 301 redirect - not we have implemented 301 redirects in Shopify backend of the store but they are not taking effect because these pages are still serving a 200OK code.

Here is an example: https://shoezero.com/collections/staff-favorites/flip-flops - it looks like this page has no products and may be generated using filters. I also noticed that you can type in any string of characters after the final trailing “/” and the page will still serve a 200 OK status code, for example: https://shoezero.com/collections/staff-favorites/flip-flopssid.

If anyone could provide insight on how to prevent these search/filter pages from being created and how to delete them to prevent over inflation of the index that would be wonderful!

2

So those urls show a collection with part of the fragment being a tag filter. All tag filters will load without a 404 so you’re correct that anything would return a 200.

Within Liquid that page would return infomration about what’s being shown. That will include how many products are being shown. With that info you could choose to add a no index meta tag, or consider showing entirely different content (or even nothing at all). Some though over the content would need to tie into your SEO strategy.

Are you looking for pointers on the code itself or is that enough to spark an idea of how to solve?

3

Do you know how to add a no index tag to these pages or even how to add any additional content to these pages? I cannot find them in the backend of the store. Should I be looking in the liquid theme template somewhere?

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