A Soft 404 Is a Page That Should Be a 404 But Does Not Act Like One
Picture this: a user visits a product page. The product was discontinued. The page loads with your site template, navigation, and footer — but the content area says "Product not found" or shows zero results.
The server returns a 200 (OK) status code. Everything looks normal to the server.
But Google is not fooled.
Google detects that the page has no real content and flags it as a "soft 404" in Search Console. It wastes crawl budget visiting these pages. And it reflects poorly on your site quality.
Where Soft 404s Hide
Search results pages with zero results. Category pages after all products are removed. User profile pages for deleted accounts. Tag pages with no associated content.
The Fix
If a page has no content, return a real 404 or 410 status code. Do not just display an empty template with a 200 response.
For e-commerce: when a product is discontinued, either redirect to a similar product (301) or return a proper 404/410. Build a helpful custom 404 page so users who do hit dead ends can find their way. Google's crawling documentation explains how soft 404s affect your site's quality signals.
For search pages: do not let internal search result pages with zero results get indexed. Noindex them or return a 404.
Check Search Console for soft 404 reports. Fix them. Track it with seocheckup.app. 113 tasks. Free. 30 seconds.