Soft 404 Errors: What They Are and How to Fix Them

What "soft 404" actually means

A real 404 tells the browser and search engines, via the HTTP status code, that the page doesn't exist. A soft 404 is a page that responds with 200 OK — meaning "here's the page you asked for" — but whose actual content looks like an error page, or is empty enough that Google decides it isn't a real page worth indexing. Google is inferring intent from content, not trusting the status code alone.

Why Google bothers flagging this

If your server claims every URL is a valid 200 response, Google can't use the status code to tell real pages from broken ones, so it has to guess from content instead — and it spends crawl and indexing effort doing that guessing across every URL on your site. Soft 404s are also a common side effect of misconfiguration that quietly hides genuinely broken pages from you, since your own uptime checks and error dashboards likely trust the 200 too.

Common causes

• A catch-all route or CMS template that renders a generic "page not found" message but never actually returns a 404/410 status.
• Internal search results pages with zero matches, rendered as a normal page with an empty results list.
• Out-of-stock or removed product pages left live with little or no remaining content.
• Single-page applications where the initial HTML response is always 200, and a client-side router decides afterward whether to show a "not found" state — Google's first-wave crawl of the raw HTML can see this as a thin, contentless page. See JavaScript SEO and indexing.

How to check for them

Search Console's Indexing → Pages report lists a Soft 404 reason under "Not indexed," with the affected URLs. See how to read the full coverage report if you haven't used it before. You can also spot-check any URL directly with the URL Inspection tool, which shows the actual HTTP status Google recorded.

How to fix each case

• Genuinely gone content: return a real 404 or 410 status from your server or framework's not-found handler — don't just change the visible text.
• Legitimately thin but real pages (an empty search state, a temporarily out-of-stock item you plan to restock): keep the 200 status, but add enough real content — related items, a restock note, category links — that the page reads as intentional rather than broken.
• Pages you don't want indexed at all but also don't want to 404 (a valid empty state a user can legitimately land on): add a noindex tag instead of leaving it ambiguous to Google.