How to Fix Soft 404 Errors and Save Your Crawl Budget
A soft 404 is a page that says 'not found' but reports success to Google. That mixed signal wastes crawl budget. Here is how to clean them up.
Reviewed by Jacob Rhinehart for Strelva's co-founder; products and operations lead responsibilities.
A soft 404 is a contradiction. The page tells the visitor "this content does not exist," but the server quietly reports a 200 "OK, here is your page" status to search engines. Google sees the mismatch, gets confused about your site's quality, and wastes crawl budget revisiting pages that have nothing to offer. The fix is to make the signal match the reality.
Where soft 404s come from
Usually from deleted content that still loads an empty shell, empty internal search results, thin placeholder pages, or moved pages that were never redirected. Each one looks like a real page to the server but a dead end to the visitor.
Step by step
- Find them. Your audit and Search Console both report soft 404s. Group them by cause: deleted, empty, thin, or moved.
- Redirect moved content. If the content lives elsewhere now, 301-redirect the old URL to the new one.
- Fix thin pages. If the page should exist but is empty, give it real content so it earns its place.
- Return a true 404. For content that is genuinely gone, make the server return an actual 404 status, not a 200 with a "not found" message.
- Build a helpful 404 page. Your real 404 page should offer a search box, links to key pages, and navigation so a lost visitor can recover.
- Verify status codes. Confirm each URL now returns the correct code, then re-scan to watch the soft-404 count fall.
The principle
Honesty in status codes is the whole game. A page that is gone should say 404. A page that moved should say 301. A page that exists should say 200 and actually have content. Match the signal to the truth and the confusion disappears.
Frequently asked
What business owners ask next.
What is the difference between a soft 404 and a real 404?
A real 404 returns a 'not found' status code, which is correct for missing pages. A soft 404 shows 'not found' content to the visitor but returns a 200 'success' code to search engines, creating a confusing mismatch.
My custom 404 page returns a 200 status. Is that wrong?
Yes. A 'not found' page should return an actual 404 status code. If a theme or plugin is serving it with a 200, that is exactly what creates soft 404s. Make sure the proper status header is sent.
I fixed them but Google still reports soft 404s. Why?
Google needs to recrawl before the reports update, which can take one to four weeks. You can speed up key pages with the URL Inspection tool's 'Request Indexing' option.