soft 404

Google’s crawlers read two signals: the HTTP status code and the rendered content. A genuine “not found” page should return 404 or 410. A soft 404 sends 200 OK, so the crawler is told “this is a valid page,” but the content says otherwise. That mismatch is the whole problem, and it is a poor experience Google chooses to exclude from results.

Common causes Google names

• A removed page that still returns 200 with a generic “page not found” message
• Empty category pages or internal search-results pages with no main content
• Thin pages where the real content never rendered (missing server-side includes, a database connection failure, blocked resources, or JavaScript that did not load)

The fix depends on the page:

• Page is gone for good: return 404 (not found) or 410 (gone)
• Page moved: use a 301 permanent redirect to the new URL
• Page should exist but got flagged: run the URL Inspection tool to see exactly what Googlebot rendered, then repair the missing content or unblock the resources

Soft 404s are not just a cosmetic warning. They waste crawl budget, because Google spends fetches on dead or empty URLs instead of the pages you want ranked, and the flagged URLs stay out of the index. On a small site a handful barely register. On an ecommerce store with faceted filters, expired listings, and zero-result search pages, they multiply into thousands and quietly drag down indexation.