Spree Fancy and Soft 404

[GeekOnCoffee]

Moved from spree/spree#2920 reported by @samhamilton

I just moved a production site over from the old default theme in Spree 1.2 to Spree Fancy and now Google webmaster tools has flagged this soft 404 issue, Spree 1.2 which did have pages and pagination on the homepage to the new spree_fancy theme which does not, Google thinks these pages are soft 404 and has somehow found 50+ of these soft 404 pages and going as high as "?page=7056" which is strange in itself as there is only around 300 products on the whole site.

You can try any page number e.g. to test this on the homepage:

http://awesome-boutique-7459.spree.mx/?p=yliwkqxcg&page=18
http://awesome-boutique-7459.spree.mx/?page=6880
Why I think something is wrong is if we compare to a category page where you get different content:

http://awesome-boutique-7459.spree.mx/products
http://awesome-boutique-7459.spree.mx/products?page=2
http://awesome-boutique-7459.spree.mx/products?page=3 - third page where we have no more products to show and so get a "No products found" error
Perhaps I am wrong in asking for a 404, perhaps a "No products found" or some other error would be a better fit? It just seemed the cleanest from a google crawling pov.

[GeekOnCoffee]

I understand where the confusion is coming from when you're migrating to this theme... this is essentially a parameter that is not valid for this page... It's not really any different then calling http://awesome-boutique-7459.spree.mx/?show_only_free_products=true, we choose to ignore the superfluous parameters rather than rejecting the page view.

Given that these pages aren't linked to anywhere, it seems like ultimately you want them to fall out of the index, but while they're there, you want to present people with meaningful information...

I think we need to know exactly what the ideal situation is, Google-wise.