Soft 404: a page that returns 200 OK but is really dead
A soft 404 is a URL that returns HTTP 200 OK while serving a dead, empty, or wrong page — a stale slug that falls back to your homepage, or a "page not found" view rendered with a 200 status. Tell the server to return a real 404/410 instead.
A soft 404 is a URL that returns HTTP 200 OK while serving a dead, empty, or wrong page — a stale slug that falls back to your homepage, or a "page not found" view rendered with a 200 status. Tell the server to return a real 404/410 instead.
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What it is
A soft 404 is a page that looks fine to a quick check (status 200) but is really gone: an SPA or CDN catch-all serves the homepage for any unknown path, a stale slug 301s to the site root, or a client-rendered "not found" screen ships with a 200 status. The page disowns itself — its canonical points elsewhere, it redirects to the root, or it renders the homepage title.
Why it matters
Google wastes crawl budget repeatedly fetching dead URLs that claim to be live, and it can quietly drop the real pages those URLs should have been. Because the status is 200, normal broken-link checks miss it entirely — the page is silently bleeding crawl efficiency and index coverage.
How to fix it
- Confirm the page is actually dead. Open the URL: does it show real, unique content, or your homepage / a "not found" message? Check whether its <link rel="canonical"> points at the site root or another URL.
- If the page is gone, return a real 404 or 410. Configure your server / CMS / framework router to respond with HTTP 404 (gone for now) or 410 (gone permanently) for missing slugs — not a 200 that falls back to the homepage.
- Remove the dead URL from your sitemap. Sitemaps should list only live, indexable URLs. Drop the stale slug so you stop inviting Google to re-crawl it.
- If the page should exist, restore unique content. When the URL is meant to be live, fix the routing or template so it serves its own content with a self-referential canonical — not a homepage fallback.
Common false positives
A real page that self-canonicalizes (its canonical points at itself) is trusted as distinct even if it reuses the site title — that is not a soft 404.
Authoritative sources
- Soft 404 errors — Google Search Central
- Google Search Central documentation — Google
- Schema.org vocabulary — schema.org
- SEO Starter Guide — Google Search Central
- MDN — HTML meta and link elements — Mozilla MDN