Google: Spammy Links Do Not Cause Soft 404 Errors

Jul 2, 2021 - 7:41 am 1 by

Google Spam Soft 404

Google's John Mueller said that spammy links to your site would not be the cause of soft 404 errors being displayed in Google Search Console. Honestly, I've never heard of this theory before, so it is new, and I figured I would share it. But I do not fully understand why someone would think spammy links would cause soft 404s.

I guess that if your 404 handling is not done correctly and someone posts a ton of fake links to your domain name but not to real URLs on your site. Then Googlebot tries to access those links and then sees a soft 404, instead of a real 404. But you should be serving up real 404 errors for URLs that do not exist on your site, you should not be serving a 200 status codes, they should be 404.

John said on Twitter "No, spammy links don't cause soft-404s."

Here are the tweets:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: June 13, 2025

Jun 13, 2025 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google AI Mode Search, Apple Intelligence Updates, Google Live Search, AI Content, SEO & Google Ads

Jun 13, 2025 - 8:01 am
Google

Google Is Now Rolling Out AI Mode In The US

Jun 13, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Drops Support For Seven Existing Structured Data Markups

Jun 13, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Shows Audience Size For Custom Segments

Jun 13, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google

Google Search Autocomplete With Back To All

Jun 13, 2025 - 7:21 am
Previous Story: Google: Crawl Budget, GoogleBot, Scheduler & JavaScript