SEO

Missing pages answer 404

Low impact · weight 3 · worth up to 0.6 points of the total score

Why it matters

When an address that does not exist answers 200, search engines index error pages as real ones, and a broken link on another site looks like it works. Sending every missing page to the homepage is treated the same way: Google calls it a soft 404. We ask the site for a page that cannot exist and look at the answer.

How to fix it

Make the server or CMS return status 404 (or 410 for pages removed on purpose) for unknown addresses, with a helpful error page in the body. Keep redirects for pages that really moved.

Check a page for this, and the other 70 checks at once

More SEO checks

Page describes itself with structured data

schema.org markup tells search engines what the page is: an article, a product with a price, a business with an address. Without it Google infers that from the text, and rich results such as stars, prices and FAQs are not available at all. It is often sold as a way into AI answers; measured, it is not: a 2025 Ahrefs study of 1,885 pages found no effect on AI citations, and AI assistants fetching a page live do not read JSON-LD. Add it for Google's rich results.

Title and H1 are related but not identical

The title is written for the search results page and the H1 for the visitor who already clicked. Making them byte-identical wastes a second chance to describe the page, while sharing no vocabulary at all suggests the two disagree about the topic.

Page has enough text to rank

There is no minimum word count in Google's rules, but a page with only a sentence or two gives search engines and AI answers little to understand, quote or rank. Pages that rank for competitive searches usually explain the subject in a few hundred words at least.

Article says when it was published and updated

Search engines and AI assistants favour recent, dated content: pages cited in AI answers are measurably fresher than the average Google result. An article with no machine-readable date looks undated, one last touched years ago looks stale, and a modified date earlier than the published one is a contradiction.

See all checks