What is Soft 404?

A soft 404 is a page that shows visitors “page not found” or empty content but returns a 200 (success) code from the server instead of an error code; Google treats these pages as error pages and does not index them.

The name is confusing: a soft 404 is not a status code but a diagnosis made by Google. The server says “everything is fine”, but the page’s content looks like an error, an empty result or an error message. Google’s documentation on status codes states that in this case Search Console shows a soft 404 error; such pages are listed on a separate row of the Page indexing report.

• The error page returns 200: the system generates a page for an address that is not found but does not change the status code.
• Old addresses have been redirected wholesale to the homepage: Google’s help page lists this among the behaviors that lead to a soft 404, and the site move documentation states that sending many old addresses to a single unrelated target has the same result.
• The page is empty or nearly empty: a category with no products left, a search page with no results.
• The page cannot be rendered properly for Google: because a critical resource fails to load, it looks empty or broken to the crawler.

The fix depends on the cause. If the page really does not exist, the server should return 404 or 410; a helpful error page can be shown to the visitor, but the code must be an error code. If the page has moved, a 301 should be set up to the equivalent address; if there is no equivalent, sending it to the homepage is not a solution. If the page exists and is valuable, the reason Google sees it as empty is found by looking at its rendered version in the URL Inspection tool. The order of decisions is in the 404 error guide.

A soft 404 is most often born on the last day of a site redesign: a quick fix is sought for hundreds of old addresses that were never mapped, and all of them are sent to the homepage. This empties the 404 list but fixes nothing for Google. The right way is to pull the list of old addresses before launch and decide on each one individually (URL inventory · website redesign and migration).

Another site was previously live on this domain, and that site’s old addresses now appear in Search Console as 404s: 70 addresses in the list outside the index on 18 September 2026. We did not redirect them to the homepage; they have no equivalents on this site, and 404 is the right answer. That same day’s report had no soft 404 row at all. Our live verification tool also tests that the addresses of source files that should not be published really do return 404; if one of these addresses returns 200, the tool reports red.

If you don’t want to lose traffic while relaunching your site, website redesign and migration inventories the old addresses, builds a chain-free 301 map and monitors the site for 90 days after the move.