TECHNICAL · SEO GLOSSARY
Soft 404
A page that returns HTTP 200 OK but displays "page not found" or otherwise empty/unhelpful content — Google treats these as wasted crawl budget and may deindex them.
Definition
A soft 404 is a page that returns a 200 HTTP status code (which tells crawlers "this page exists and has content") but actually displays a "page not found" message, an empty template, a login wall, or other non-content response. From the crawler's perspective, the page looks real (200 status), but from a content quality perspective, it's useless. Common causes: CMS "not found" templates that return 200 instead of 404, search results pages with no results that return 200 with "no products found", member-only content that returns a login prompt (200) instead of a 401, and dynamically generated pages for non-existent entities that display an empty template.
Why it matters for SEO
Soft 404s are one of the most insidious technical SEO problems because they're invisible in HTTP status monitoring — everything looks "live". Google Search Console surfaces soft 404s in the Coverage report when Googlebot detects that a 200-response page has minimal content. Soft 404s waste crawl budget (Googlebot visits these pages repeatedly thinking they're real), dilute index quality, and can trigger Google's "site quality" evaluation if a site has many of them. The fix is to configure the CMS to return a proper 404 status for truly missing pages, or to ensure dynamically generated pages either have content or redirect to a parent page.
How DeepSEOAnalysis checks this
The audit identifies potential soft 404s by checking 200-status pages with: (1) word count below 50 words, (2) title tags containing "not found", "404", "no results", or "error", (3) pages that are carbon copies of other pages with only the URL different, and (4) pages that appear in the sitemap but have zero meaningful content in the crawled HTML. These are flagged as soft 404 candidates for manual review.
Useful tools and resources
GLOSSARY
Related terms
technical
Crawlability
Whether search engine crawlers can successfully access, fetch, and parse a page — the prerequisite for indexing and ranking.
Read definition →technical
Index Coverage
The count and status of pages Google has discovered, crawled, and indexed from a site — tracked in Google Search Console.
Read definition →technical
Crawl Budget
The number of pages Googlebot will crawl on a site within a given timeframe — determined by crawl rate limit and crawl demand.
Read definition →onpage
Thin Content
Pages with little or no unique value — low word count, duplicated from other sources, or auto-generated — that Google may ignore or penalize.
Read definition →technical
301 Redirect
A permanent HTTP redirect that passes ~90–99% of link equity from the old URL to the new one — the correct redirect type for permanent URL changes in SEO.
Read definition →See how your site scores on Soft 404.
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