Soft 404 error

A URL that shows visitors a page saying it doesn't exist, or an empty page, while telling Google the request succeeded with a 200 status code.

Google describes a soft 404 error as “when a URL that returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist and also a 200 (success) status code” (Google Search Central). It can also be a page with no main content, or an empty page. Google’s examples of causes include a broken connection to the database, an empty internal search result page and a JavaScript file that didn’t load.

Google excludes these pages from Search. When its systems decide from the content that a page is really an error page, Search Console shows a soft 404 error in the site’s Page Indexing report.

How to fix one

Google gives three cases:

• If the page is gone and nothing replaces it, return a 404 (not found) or 410 (gone) status code. A custom 404 page can still help visitors, with your site’s navigation and links to popular pages.
• If the page moved or has a clear replacement, return a 301 redirect to the new page.
• If the page still exists, it probably didn’t load properly for Googlebot, was missing critical resources or showed a prominent error message. Check the rendered page and the status code with the URL Inspection tool.

Google also lists soft 404 pages among the kinds of URL that, exposed in large numbers, can hurt how a site is crawled and indexed, and says to “Return a 404 code when a page no longer exists.”

Related terms

• 301 redirect
• Google Search Console
• Crawl budget

Tools for it

• Technical SEO, audits and speed

Sources

• https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/troubleshoot-crawling-errors (Oct 14, 2026)

Updated Oct 14, 2026.