I have a page linked to a “products” datatype. These products are unique and once sold are gone forever and I delete the thing from my DB. On the page I redirect to 404 if this page’s thing is empty.
The problem is bubble will not send a http 404 error code, instead it still sends http 200 OK status. Google considers this a soft 404 and soft 404s are bad. Google will continue to crawl these pages, wasting your crawl budget and if you have too many soft 404s it will take it as a signal that your website has quality issues and you will get penalized for it (either in your SEO rankings or by them determining your site is not worth crawling). Sending hard 404s is the correct way to signal to google to forget an URL. Here’s a link to google on Soft 404s.
The only thing I can think of is blocking crawling entirely for the page in robots.txt with disallow, but this is no solution.
Anyone have any ideas? Just pinging some names I’ve seen pop up a lot on SEO topics @adamhholmes @stuart4 @josh24 @NigelG @ed727 @boston85719