Soft 404
A soft 404 is a URL that returns a 200 OK status while its content indicates the page does not exist. Because the status code says the response is valid, crawl budget is spent on it and the indexing stage has to infer that the content is missing.
The mismatch between the status code and the content is the whole problem. A
crawler trusts the status code first. A 200 means “here is a real page”, so
the response is queued for indexing, and only then does the engine work out that
the body says “sorry, nothing here”.
Common causes:
- A custom error page served with
200instead of404. - An empty category, search result or filter page that renders a “no results” message.
- A removed product page redirecting to the homepage rather than to a relevant replacement.
- A page whose content failed to load, leaving only the template.
The fix depends on intent. If the page is genuinely gone, return 404, or 410
if you want it dropped faster. If it moved, 301 to the closest equivalent, not
to the homepage. If it is a legitimately empty state that will fill later —
a category with no products this week — keep the 200 but make sure the page
has real content explaining what it is.
Google Search Console reports these under “Soft 404” in the Page Indexing report.