Hello community,
My website on the google search console show some /offline after my domaine name.
Was wondering how to remove them? Should I exclude “/offline” in the robots.txt, or can I delete those pages in the GSC directly?
Thanks for some help
Hi Mickael,
I’d just ignore it, it’s not penalizing you in any way. That page doesn’t exist and there’s no content there that you want indexed, so it’s pretty irrelevant.
“Soft 404” is a bit of a strange error, since at least currently https://www.rivaje.fr/offline returns a 404, and you don’t have any redirect setup that would affect it.
There are two possibilities as to why Google tried to crawl that URL;
Somewhere on your site, you have a URL pointing there, perhaps in blob content, or even in a script-generated redirect. You’d have to search for that site-wide to find it, if it exists.
This might be a part of PWA’s. Google continually adjusts their search engine strategy so the behavior can be unpredictable. Webflow sites publish a manifest.json file which is part of the progressive web apps initiative. One of the functions of PWAs, in a full implementation, is to allow the content to be accessed while you’re offline. Webflow sites aren’t apps in the traditional sense, so that functionality isn’t part of the intended use case- but it seems possible to me Google would see the manifest.json and then check to see if there’s anything at /offline, even though it’s not specified. That’s just a hypothesis, I haven’t read much of the PWA spec.
Upshot is, don’t worry about it.
