A Practical Guide to Soft 404 Errors
Pages that tell visitors something does not exist, such as an out-of-stock or empty search page, while returning a 200 success status to crawlers.
Samir Haddad
What is at stake
Soft 404s waste crawling and can be dropped from the index anyway, and Search Console reports them as a problem to fix.
The playbook
- Return a real 404 or 410 for removed content
- Redirect retired pages to a close equivalent where one exists
- Give empty category pages useful content or noindex them
- Handle expired listings consistently
- Review soft 404 reports after catalog changes
Where it goes wrong
Avoid:
- Custom error pages that return 200
- Redirecting every missing page to the homepage
- Leaving thousands of empty filtered pages
- Ignoring soft 404 warnings
The numbers behind it
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Definition | a page that returns 200 but appears to be an error or empty page |
| Correct statuses | 404 or 410 for pages that no longer exist |
| Search Console | reports soft 404s in the Page indexing report |
| Common causes | empty categories, expired listings and thin placeholder pages |
Getting outside help
When to hand it over: Bring in help when Search Console reports many soft 404s, or when a large catalog has frequent expired items.
Where this comes from
- Google Search Central — Soft 404 errors
- Google Search Central — How HTTP status codes affect Google Search
The figures and practices above come from the sources listed.
Working on something like this?
We take on SEO Services work for teams who want it done once, properly. Tell us what you are building and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right studio for it. Start a project.
Where to go next
Spotted something wrong? Report an error on this page. We correct on the page and say what changed.
