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Noah
Noah
Jan 19, 2025, 11:20 AM
Forwarded from another channel:
Forwarded thread from another channel:
Ian Cappelletti
Ian Cappelletti
Dec 24, 2024, 10:26 PM
what can trigger the GSC inspection live test to fail for a "soft 404"? recall the typical experience is the page passes the live test but then GSC pushes it to the Soft 404s report after googlebot crawls.
relatedly, how much content-based evaluation does the live test perform, if any?
Valentin Pletzer
Valentin Pletzer
Dec 24, 2024, 11:33 PM
I don’t know about the content evaluation part. I guess there is none.
As for the soft 404: two things came to mind
URL inspect does JavaScript rendering. But there might be delays or issues when the real crawl happens. If JavaScript injects important information into the page and it fails, this might explain it.
Another thing I remember is an edge case: If the page resembles an error page, because it is an article about error pages, it might be mistaken for one.
Ian Cappelletti
Ian Cappelletti
Dec 24, 2024, 11:52 PM
yeah, and the other big criterion is if the page is basically empty. in this case, the page is an average PLP that lists a handful of relevant in-stock items: it ain't empty and features no error code language onpage. that's why i was asking about content eval - something in the live test to checks if a page resembles a 404 page, contains 'error' prominently, etc.
i do see a lot error management code in the rendered source, like 'error' shows up 80 times, so maybe your first idea could be the ticket?
Valentin Pletzer
Valentin Pletzer
Dec 25, 2024, 12:09 AM
Would be a good question for @John Mueller Can URL inspect detect soft 404s?
I would hope that the word error couldn’t cause issues as long as it is within the JavaScript part of the page.
I am always hesitant to create tickets on hunches but as a “last” resort I think it might be worth a try.
Ian Cappelletti
Ian Cappelletti
Dec 25, 2024, 12:11 AM
yeah that's my understanding too. really not seeing anything odd inline in the render. it passes rich results test btw
Mika Lepistö
Mika Lepistö
Dec 25, 2024, 1:40 AM
Just curious, is the same URL in the soft 404s already?
John Mueller
John Mueller
Dec 25, 2024, 2:15 AM
> Can URL inspect detect soft 404s?
I don't think it can consistently, since some kinds of soft-404s take a bit more to recognize. FWIW some other ways I've seen a soft-404 trigger are over-protective bot-protections, out-of-stock products, error-redirects (instead of a 404, redirect somewhere unrelated).
Ian Cappelletti
Ian Cappelletti
Dec 25, 2024, 3:55 AM
J man, can you point to any official documentation about the over-protective bot rules triggering it? that might very well be the culprit
Ian Cappelletti
Ian Cappelletti
Dec 25, 2024, 4:00 AM
@Mika Lepistö the number of soft 404s is increasing incrementally, albeit slowly, and the ones i've seen so far that fail the live test were already listed in the report
John Mueller
John Mueller
Dec 25, 2024, 6:09 AM
@Ian Cappelletti there is no direct documentation for that. It's basically Google tries to index what it gets, and what it gets is partially controlled by the server, DDOS protections, CDN, bot-protection, etc -- whatever you have in the chain between "your pages" and "the Internet". Google doesn't know where the weirdness gets added, it just sees the end result. To be fair, mainstream systems are reasonably good at not blocking Google, but if you say "no bots", who is to say what you're ok with? SEOs (often) think of search engines = ok, but not everyone thinks the same ???? .
Mika Lepistö
Mika Lepistö
Dec 25, 2024, 7:14 AM
@Ian Cappelletti have you tried to validate the fix on the soft 404s and did it fail or complete?
Mika Lepistö
Mika Lepistö
Dec 25, 2024, 7:34 AM
Where I'm going with that (and I don't know that I've ever tried it, not purposefully at least) is I'm wondering if there is a connection between a known soft 404 that is triggering that response on inspect because it hasn't run through the fix validation.
A couple things stand out in your screenshot:
• crawl date is dec 17. Did you do it then or on the 24th when you posted this?
• it does say indexing allowed at the bottom...
Funky.
Mika Lepistö
Mika Lepistö
Dec 25, 2024, 8:22 AM
Is there a difference in content if you fetch it as Googlebot via another tool?
Ian Cappelletti
Ian Cappelletti
Dec 25, 2024, 2:37 PM
we don't know yet because they are heavily blocking spoofing by user-agent and IP. John's point about overprotecting against bots sometimes being a cause seems all too convenient so i'm going to run with that as the hypothesis for now.
ty everyone!
Mika Lepistö
Mika Lepistö
Dec 25, 2024, 3:24 PM
Have you tried google's rich snippet testing tool? Gets Google user agent and IP, so potentially another data point when checking against blocking.
Ian Cappelletti
Ian Cappelletti
Dec 25, 2024, 3:26 PM
yeah the soft 404s that fail live tests pass rich results tests
Mika Lepistö
Mika Lepistö
Dec 25, 2024, 6:14 PM
Have you compared the page/source from the rich results test to what you get in browser see if there is any difference?

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