Soft 404.

A soft 404 is a page that returns a successful HTTP 200 status code but contains no meaningful content—typically showing a 'page not found' or 'no results' message while technically appearing accessible to crawlers. Because the server says '200 OK', search engines may crawl and attempt to index these pages, wasting crawl budget and potentially surfacing empty pages in search results.

Common Causes of Soft 404s

Soft 404s frequently occur on: e-commerce sites with empty search results pages (`/search?q=unavailable-product`), faceted navigation URLs that generate zero results, deleted blog posts that revert to a 'post not found' template with a 200 status, and CMS pages whose content was removed but the URL template left intact returning an empty body.

Fixing Soft 404s

The fix depends on intent: if the content is genuinely removed and won't return, change the HTTP status to 404 or 410. If the URL should show content, create or restore it. For pagination and search result pages with no results, use a noindex tag or return a 404 when query parameters produce empty result sets. Google Search Console's Coverage report flags detected soft 404s under 'Excluded'.