Technical SEO Wiki Entry

Soft 404

A page that returns a 200 status but displays not-found-style content.

Soft 404s confuse search engines and waste crawl budget by appearing valid while delivering empty content. Common causes include "no products found" pages, expired listings, internal search with zero results and broken includes returning HTML errors. Fix by returning proper 404/410 status codes when content genuinely doesn't exist.

Related Entries

HTTP Status Codes

Standardised server response codes that indicate request outcomes.

Index Coverage Report

A Search Console report showing which URLs Google has indexed and any issues.

Thin Content

Pages with little or no original value, often associated with low rankings.

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