Soft 404
A soft 404 is a page that returns a 200 success status while showing content indicating nothing was found, such as an empty results page or a 'page not found' message. Google detects the mismatch and treats it as an error.
Why it matters for your rankings
Soft 404s waste crawl budget on pages that will never rank, and they are harder to find than real errors because every monitoring tool reports them as working normally.
The frequent cause is well-intentioned: redirecting removed pages to the homepage rather than returning an error. Google recognises that the destination has nothing to do with the requested URL and classifies it as a soft 404, passing no link equity. Empty category pages, out-of-stock product pages and zero-result internal searches produce the same signal at scale on ecommerce sites. The fix depends on the case, but it always involves being honest about the status code rather than disguising the outcome.
How to check it on your site
Read the Search Console report
Indexing then Pages lists Soft 404 as an exclusion reason with example URLs.
Return honest status codes
A missing page should return 404 or 410, not a 200 with an apology message.
Stop redirecting everything to the homepage
Redirect to a genuinely relevant page or return an error. The homepage is not a relevant destination.
Handle empty states properly
Empty category or search pages should either return a 404 or offer genuinely useful alternative content.