A soft 404 is a page that sends the 200 “OK” status code to browsers and search engines but shows content that looks like an error, an empty page or a dead end. Google spots the mismatch, treats the page as not found and leaves it out of its index.
How a soft 404 works
Every time a page loads, the server sends a status code. A 200 means the page exists and is fine; a 404 means it does not exist. A soft 404 is a contradiction between the two: the code says everything is fine, but the content says otherwise. Google does not take the status code on trust. It looks at the rendered page and, if it resembles an error or has almost nothing on it, it reports the URL as a soft 404 in the Search Console Page indexing report.
Typical causes include:
- A custom “page not found” template that returns 200 instead of 404.
- Empty category pages, such as a shop collection with no products in stock.
- Internal search results pages showing “no results found”.
- Product pages that only say “this item is no longer available”.
- Removed pages redirected to the homepage or an unrelated page. Google often treats those redirects as soft 404s.
- Pages that depend on JavaScript to load their content, where rendering fails and Google sees an empty shell.
Why it matters
If a page you want to rank is flagged as a soft 404, it will not appear in search, however good the rest of your site is. Online shops with seasonal stock are especially exposed: a “winter coats” collection that sits empty all summer can be marked as a soft 404, and then has to be recrawled and reassessed when stock returns in the autumn.
Soft 404s also waste crawl budget on larger sites, and when they come from redirects, they mean the value of the old URL was not passed on. After a migration, a rise in soft 404s often points to lazy redirects sending old pages to the homepage.
Common mistakes
- Error pages that return 200. Common on bespoke builds and some page builders. Check the actual status code, not just what the page says.
- Homepage redirects as a catch-all. Convenient for the developer, poor for visitors and treated as soft 404s.
- Leaving out-of-stock products bare. A product coming back in stock should keep its description, images and an expected date or alternatives.
- Treating all soft 404s as one problem. Some need a proper 404, some need content and some need a better redirect.
How to act on it
Open the Page indexing report in Search Console and select “Soft 404”. Export the list and sort the URLs into three groups. Pages that are genuinely gone should return 404 or 410. Pages that have moved should 301 to their closest equivalent. Pages you want indexed need more substance: real product details, an introduction to the category, related items, or a fix to the rendering problem.
Use URL Inspection to view the rendered HTML of any page you think was flagged wrongly. Once fixed, validate the fix in Search Console. If soft 404s keep returning after each stock change or plugin update, the cause is usually in the templates, which is the kind of root-cause fix I handle in technical SEO.