What is a soft 404?
A soft 404 is a page that returns a 200 OK status code but displays ‘not found’ or empty content — often a broken page that fails to return a proper 404 response. Search engines treat it as a page that should not exist.
Why soft 404s matter
Soft 404s confuse crawlers: they keep crawling URLs that lead nowhere, wasting crawl budget and clogging the index with worthless pages. Google reports them in Search Console as crawl anomalies.
Common causes and fixes
- Dynamic sites returning 200 for missing items — fix status codes.
- Redirects to a generic ‘not found’ page with 200 — return 404.
- JS-rendered empty pages — serve proper server responses.
- Deleted products still accessible — 301 to alternatives or 404.
Related terms
How Social SEO Team can help
We eliminate soft 404s in technical audits. Explore our technical SEO services.