isabella232 / wds-harden-soft-404s

Harden the soft 404's of your WordPress site with this plugin!

WDS - Harden Soft 404s

Contributors: webdevstudios, patrickgarman

Donate link: http://webdevstudios.com

Tags: soft 404

Requires at least: 3.8.0

Tested up to: 4.1.0

Stable tag: 1.0.0

License: GPLv2 or later

License URI: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

Description

In WordPress when a search result or post archive has no results, a HTTP 200 status code is returned. This is sometimes not desired for various reasons, namely SEO. This plugin will trigger a true HTTP 404 status code when "no results are found" rather than a "soft 404" of having no results yet still returning a 200 error code. Google (and other search engines) will not index a page returning a 404, but it will index a page returning a soft 404. Harden your 404's to keep empty result pages out of search engine indexes!

Installation

If installing the plugin from wordpress.org:

1. Download a ZIP of the plugin
2. Install the plugin through your WordPress dashboard or by using FTP/SFTP

Changelog

1.0.0 - 2015-03-10

Initial Release