Optimizing Your Crawl Budget : Soft 404 and Tags Clean up

Fixing Soft 404 Errors

One of the most effective ways to enhance your site's technical SEO is by optimizing your crawl budget—the number of pages Google allocates resources for to crawl on your site. By ensuring that Google prioritizes your most valuable and high-performing pages, you can improve search rankings and increase organic traffic.

The Issue: Soft 404 Errors Draining Your Crawl Budget

A common yet often overlooked issue that affects crawl budget efficiency is soft 404 errors. These occur when pages that don’t serve meaningful content (such as empty or broken pages) mistakenly return a “200 OK” response instead of a proper “404 Not Found” status. As a result, Google continues to crawl and index these irrelevant pages, wasting valuable resources. Google explicitly recommends resolving soft 404 errors as a crucial step in managing crawl budgets effectively.

What We Discovered

Through a detailed Google Search Console (GSC) audit, we identified that empty RSS feeds were contributing to soft 404 errors. These unnecessary feeds were consuming the crawl budget and potentially signaling poor site quality to Google.

How We Resolved It

We implemented a simple yet effective fix: removing empty RSS feeds to eliminate soft 404 errors. This immediately:

• Freed up the crawl budget for more important pages.
  
• Improved Google’s perception of site quality.
  
• Ensured that high-value content gets indexed faster.

Low-Value Tag Pages Hurting SEO

In technical SEO, one of the most overlooked issues is the impact of low-content tag pages on search rankings. On our regular audits we noticed that many websites have tag pages that contain only a few articles—or none at all. Due to thin content, Google sees them as low-value, thus negatively affecting SEO. To tackle these challenges, our team has developed an effective solution to optimize tag pages, ensuring they provide value to both users and search engines.

Our SEO Solution

We have implemented two key changes to enhance the quality of tag pages:

1. Applying "noindex" to tag pages with fewer than four articles , ensuring that only high-value pages appear in search results.
2. Displaying a 404 page for tag pages with either one or zero articles. Previously, users could manually enter a tag name—even if it had never been used—and land on an empty tag page. With our update, any tag page with one or zero articles will now return a 404 error, preventing users and search engines from accessing irrelevant pages.