A soft 404 occurs when a page effectively displays “not found” or empty content to users, but the server incorrectly returns a 200 (success) status code instead of a proper 404 error, confusing search engines about the page’s actual status.
Soft 404s are problematic because search engines may continue trying to index pages that offer no real content, wasting crawl budget and potentially diluting a site’s overall quality signals with genuinely empty or broken pages.
Fixing soft 404s typically involves ensuring the server returns the correct 404 status code for genuinely missing content, or properly redirecting to relevant, working pages where appropriate.
Soft 404 detection is part of our Technical SEO audits.