• SEO by the SEA, Monday, June 22, 2009 12 PM

A patent application from Yahoo describes a process to serve-up 404 (not found) server messages that SEO experts might use when a site isn't set up properly to communicate the page the query requests. Sometimes the site might send a 200 message instead to tell the browser everything is okay when it's not, according to Bill Slawski.

The patent application attempts to identify soft 404 errors and redirect them to login pages, Slawski writes. It does this by clustering Web pages from a site sharing similarities based on "characteristics of the content of the Web pages" in each cluster. He also explains why search engines might want to identify soft 404 pages on Web sites, which would include knowing to skip and not index them for one reason or another.

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