Spot the root causes behind sudden increases in 404s and soft 404s. Use Google’s 2025 diagnostics and update sitemaps and redirects to stabilise indexing.
Which first step best distinguishes hard 404s from soft 404s in a spike?
Purge the CDN globally
Disable JavaScript sitewide
Regenerate all thumbnails
Use Search Console’s examples and check live responses and HTML
Which change commonly creates widespread hard 404s after a release?
Switching to Brotli compression
Adding a new font format
Updating the favicon
Template or route changes that drop old paths without redirects
In Google’s 2025 guidance, which pages tend to be labeled soft 404s?
Pages with many images
Near‑empty or irrelevant pages that return 200 but offer no useful content
Pages using HTTP/2
Pages with canonical tags
After pruning, which action helps avoid crawl waste on removed URLs?
Remove them from sitemaps and add redirects where replacements exist
Set meta keywords to blank
Turn off HTTP keep‑alive
Disallow the entire site in robots.txt for a day
Which tool verifies whether Google can render a page that’s being mislabeled?
Chrome DevTools Coverage tab alone
CDN cache logs only
URL Inspection’s rendered HTML
DNS query log
If a spike is limited to a single directory, which cause is most likely?
A DNS TTL tweak
A change to image compression
A routing or build change specific to that section
A global TLS configuration change
What status should you serve for content permanently removed with no replacement?
404/410 and ensure it’s not in sitemaps
302 to a random category
200 with an apology
301 to the homepage
Which crawl‑control tactic helps prevent 404 exploration of infinite spaces?
Add noindex to the homepage
Set cache‑control: no‑store on HTML
Limit internal links and sitemaps to valuable URLs only
Use Disallow: / in robots.txt briefly
Which remediation best addresses soft 404s on product pages with zero stock and zero info?
Serve a 200 with an empty div
Replace the page with only an image
Loop users back to search without notice
Add useful alternatives or return 404 if permanently unavailable
What evidence indicates a measurement artifact rather than a real 404 problem?
Canonical tags added correctly
Redirect mappings present
Updated sitemaps submitted
Coverage spike without matching server logs or user‑visible errors
Starter
Start with Search Console coverage, sample URLs, and recent deploy notes.
Solid
You’re tracing patterns by template and fixing root causes—not just the symptoms.
Expert!
Excellent forensic discipline with redirects, sitemaps, and parity validated end‑to‑end.
