What a soft 404 actually is

A soft 404 is a URL that looks like a page to the server (status 200) and looks empty or “not found” to the search engine. Google Search Console lists these separately from hard 404s. The HTML often says “product gone”, “no results”, or a thin category with zero items.

A hard 404 is honest: the server returns 404 (or 410). Bots and browsers agree the document is missing.

Why 200 + empty is worse

Link checkers that only store the status code will mark the URL as fine. Users still bounce. Google may drop the URL from the index without a clean signal for a replacement. Blanket homepage redirects of dead products often land in the same bucket.

Typical factories:

• CMS “not found” templates that still return 200
• Empty filtered catalog pages
• Search pages with zero hits
• “Discontinued” product templates with no substitute URL

What to do

1. If the content moved, 301 to the successor. One hop. See 301 vs 302 and redirect chains.
2. If it is gone for good, return 404 or 410 on that URL. A friendly HTML message is fine; the status must match.
3. Pull those URLs out of XML sitemaps.
4. Open the live template in Chrome and confirm what the browser actually got: status, body, and whether the nav still points here. Page scan and highlighting show the in-page links a headless dump can skip.

Search Console tells you what Google already classified. A scan of the page you are looking at tells you what ships today. Use both.

This is not a ranking “penalty toggle”. It is a mismatch between HTTP and content. Fix the mismatch.