Linking to a zip file creates a “soft 404” in Google Search Console

Question

I Google Search Console, I keep getting a "Soft 404" error for links that point to a zip file.

The html looks like this:

<a href="/downloads.php?id=7" title="Description" download>Click here</a>

When clicked, the url is generated like this:

header("Location: " . $row["url"]);

Where the url is something link: https://www.example.com/file.zip

So the page is not a 404 - in fact it's not a page, but a file. How can I fix this for Google?

Answer 1

header("Location: " . $row["url"]);

This generates a 302 status code response by default.

You could make this a 301, that should make this “soft 404” go away - but then Google will identify https://www.example.com/file.zip as the actual target URL, and index that one, and show it as a search result.