What Is a Soft 404 Error and How Do You Fix It Fast?
Why Google treats some 200 OK pages as missing, and the two correct fixes.
Aditya Challa1 min read
Summary
A soft 404 is a URL that returns a 200 OK status while its content tells users the page does not exist, or is so empty that Google treats it as missing. Google reports these in Search Console and does not index them.
Why it matters
Soft 404s waste crawl effort and confuse users. Google's documentation recommends returning a proper status code instead.
How to fix it
- If the page is gone, return 404 or 410
- If it moved, use a 301 redirect to the closest relevant page
- If it should exist, add real content so it is not thin or empty
Common causes
Empty search or category pages, out-of-stock product templates with no content, and JavaScript apps that render an error message but still send 200.
Check in Search Console
Look in the Page indexing report for "Soft 404", then test the URL with URL Inspection after fixing it.
Related: /blog/what-does-crawled-currently-not-indexed-mean
Related: /blog/how-do-i-submit-a-sitemap-to-google
Sources
Lab evidence
What I found running this
Facts in this draft were checked on 12 Oct 2026 against the primary sources listed in the body (official docs, release schedules or Google/YouTube help pages). No benchmarks or timings were run, so the post makes no performance or measurement claims; dates are quoted as published by the maintainers, and any estimate is labelled as such.
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