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What is a soft 404?

Last updated .

A soft 404 is a page that tells visitors nothing is here, or shows nothing, while the server answers with a success code such as 200. Google’s documentation says that when a 2xx page looks like an error page or is empty, Search Console shows a soft 404 error.

Definition
Soft 404
A page that looks like an error page or is empty but returns a 2xx success status, which Search Console reports as a soft 404 error.

Where they come from

Custom error pages that forget to set the status, empty search results pages, thin pages generated for every filter, a CMS that redirects missing pages to the home page and parked or default host pages after a hosting change.

Why they matter

Search engines may drop such URLs from the index, and monitors that trust the status code report a failing site as healthy. Both views point to the same fix: send the right status for what the page is.

A quick test

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://example.com/this-page-does-not-exist should print 404. If it prints 200 and the page says “not found”, or redirects to the home page with a 200, search engines see a soft 404 and a status-code monitor sees a healthy site. Fix it at the source: the CMS or server must send 404 or 410 for a missing page and 503 for maintenance.

Search Console lists soft 404 URLs in its page indexing report. Work through the list by template rather than URL by URL, because one broken template usually produces hundreds of them.

What to check

That missing pages return 404 or 410, that maintenance returns 503, that important pages contain expected text and that Search Console’s soft 404 list is empty or understood.

Sources

Read on . Standards and vendor pages change; confirm the current text before you rely on it.

Guides that use this term

  • HTTP status codeAn HTTP status code is the three-digit number that opens a server response and says how the request went: 2xx success, 3xx redirect, 4xx client error, 5xx server error.
  • Uptime monitoringUptime monitoring requests a website from outside at intervals and alerts when it fails to answer. What it measures, what it misses and how it is confirmed.
  • IndexingIndexing is how a search engine stores a page it has crawled so it can be returned for queries. What decides whether a page is indexed and why crawled does not mean indexed.

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