Soft 404

What is a soft 404?

A soft 404 is a page that shows visitors that the content doesn’t exist or is empty, while the server still returns a normal 200 status code instead of a 404 error. Google recognizes this in many cases and reports it in Search Console as a soft 404, after which the page is usually not indexed.

Why is a soft 404 important?

• Wasted crawl budget: Google keeps visiting useless pages.
• Confusing signals: an empty page with a 200 status code looks like real content.
• A poor experience: visitors land on an empty page with no way forward.

Examples of a soft 404

• A sold-out product that only says “not available”, with no alternatives
• A search results page with no results
• An error page that says “Page not found” but returns a 200 status code

How do you fix a soft 404?

Open the Page indexing report in Google Search Console, check the reported URLs and decide what should be there. If the page really no longer exists, return a 404 or 410. If there is a good alternative, use a 301 redirect. If the page does have value, fill it with real content. See technical SEO.