Definition

A soft 404 is a URL that returns a successful HTTP 200 status code while serving content that tells the user — and Google — that the requested page doesn't exist.

Google flags soft 404s in Search Console because the mismatched signal wastes crawl budget: the crawler treats the response as a real page and may keep recrawling. The remedy is to return an actual 404 (or 410) status for missing content, or — if the original URL has a permanent home — a 301 redirect to that destination. Thin or near-empty pages can also be classified as soft 404s when Google judges they don't deliver the content the URL promised.

Examples

• Out-of-stock product pages

  A retailer's removed product URLs serve a 'product not found' template at HTTP 200. Search Console reports them under "Soft 404" in the Page Indexing report; Google eventually drops them from the index but uses crawl budget on each one until then.

Sources

• Google Search Central — HTTP status codes (Soft 404 errors)

Related terms

• 301 Redirect
  A permanent redirect — an HTTP 301 status code telling clients and search engines that a URL has moved permanently to a new location.
• Indexing
  The process by which a search engine analyses a fetched page and stores information about it so the page can later be returned in search results.
• Crawl Budget
  The number of URLs a search engine crawler will fetch and the rate at which it fetches them on a given site.

Where QueryCatch uses this

• SEO Audit