Over the past several days, I think starting around April 9th, Google made some change to how it detects soft 404s and that change may be causing ranking issues for some sites in Google Search.
A soft 404 is when Google sees a page that returns a 200 (everything is normal) status code but Google thinks the page should return a 404 (page not found) status code.
John Mueller of Google somewhat confirmed the issue in last Friday's video hangout when he was asked about it at the 10:11 mark into the video. John said "As far as I could tell from from the information I have so far is it's essentially a small change we made in the soft 404 detection and how that's picking things up in weird ways."
Olaf Olleck Kopp who asked the question couldn't share specific details but said "the rankings daily decreasing only for desktop ranking."
Jordan Silton shared a lot more detail on Twitter showing the Search Console issues with the soft 404s and the resulting in desktop ranking declines in Google Search. Here are his tweets:
Our "Downtown Los Angeles" page used to rank #1, but now we're at the bottom of the first page for a smaller historic neighborhood and page 3 of the parenthttps://t.co/xRCiyz9RPLhttps://t.co/5QJxvkbuXC pic.twitter.com/r6SSOnjsKc
— Jordan Silton (@jsilton) April 12, 2021
"Page 4" of a series would be the #2 most relevant pages for a search for "west loop apartments chicago", right? Unfortunately the first page of the series is missing from Google's index.https://t.co/WVBXIBrTgghttps://t.co/qgqDjgSM2K pic.twitter.com/S2XvnK4tie
— Jordan Silton (@jsilton) April 12, 2021
If it would be helpful to have more examples, I can easily provide them. Thanks again for taking a look @JohnMu!
— Jordan Silton (@jsilton) April 12, 2021
John said he sent these examples and some others to the team to investigate.
Here is the video embed where this conservation came up:
Here is the transcript:
Olaf: We got a serious problem with the project at the moment, since last week. We got a we got only for the desk Google desktop bot we got soft 404 errors and we so we the rankings daily decreasing only for desktop ranking and we don't know what is what is it what is the error, we can't find a find in a solution for that.
John: I think you also posted on Twitter. There are some other other people who had similar problems.
With the other people I was able to pick up the URLs and send them to the team and I think they're looking into what what is happening there. But if you want maybe you can just drop your domain in the chat here and then I can pass it out. Okay well if you want to send it to me in in some other way let me know, I am happy to pass it on.
I think the team has found some things that they're looking into. But having more examples is always really useful.
Olaf: Is it is it is a Google problem or our website problem?
John: As far as I could tell from from the information I have so far is it's essentially a small change we made in the soft 404 detection and how that's picking things up in weird ways.
Olaf did also post this on Twitter:
@JohnMu I Would like to send the urls depending on the problem we talked today in webmaster hangout with the soft 404 errors. Could ad me here or linkedin, that I can send you affected URLs?
— Oᒪᗩᖴ KOᑭᑭ ✌️ 👍 (@Olaf_Kopp) April 9, 2021
There is also this more detailed thread at Google Webmaster Help that others are talking about.
I did ask John for confirmation but I am waiting to hear back:
@JohnMu you mentioned in the Friday hangout something about a 404 bug. Does that impact rankings in Search or it is just a Search Console reporting issue?
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) April 13, 2021
Forum discussion at Twitter and Twitter & Google Webmaster Help.
Update: As of April 20th, this seems to be resolved.
