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Ask HN: Google Search Console Tools says my website produces “soft 404”

1 pointsby gajusalmost 3 years ago
Here is an example:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;contra.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;gkOQlbLq-validating-postgre-sql-results-and-inferring-query-static-types<p>Attempting to index this page using Google Search Console Tools gives an error saying that &quot;Availability: Soft 404&quot;<p>I have done a ton of tests and I don&#x27;t see anything wrong with this page.

3 comments

gregjoralmost 3 years ago
Google explains it here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;docs&#x2F;advanced&#x2F;crawling&#x2F;http-network-errors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;search&#x2F;docs&#x2F;advanced&#x2F;crawling&#x2F;...</a><p>This article has more details:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.searchenginejournal.com&#x2F;technical-seo&#x2F;404-vs-soft-404-errors&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.searchenginejournal.com&#x2F;technical-seo&#x2F;404-vs-sof...</a><p>It looks like the page on your site loads the content dynamically. I’m seeing a loading animation. Since it appears the content is just static HTML try delivering it that way.
politelemonalmost 3 years ago
I think it can happen if the page is very light on the HTML aspect and doing too much in the JS, so the page &#x27;appears&#x27; empty to the crawler.<p>Their crawler is perfectly fine with SPAs, and I&#x27;ve indexed SPAs before. But when I visited your URL it seems to be doing too much before gets to the actual content.<p>Notably I see an initial batch of JS loads, a pause, and then another batch of JS loads before the actual content finally appears - there must be some threshold that the crawler is hitting to make it say that&#x27;s a soft 404.<p>When visiting your page, I see almost 400 requests over 8MB, can that be reduced, can you load your content quickly instead of this initial setup you&#x27;re doing?
gajusalmost 3 years ago
Turns out that the reason was 200+ JavaScript requests.<p>This is problematic given that this is how ESM is supposed to work.<p>We ended up bundling _all_ JavaScript to a single bundle and now Google indexes it with no problem.