A soft 404 is Google telling you that a page returned 200 OK and then failed to contain anything.
People treat it as a bug in Google’s classifier. In my experience it is almost always correct, and arguing with it is the wrong instinct. The page really is empty. Google has simply noticed before you did.
Google’s own documentation on this is blunt about the cause: a soft 404 happens when a URL returns a success code but the content signals that the page does not exist. The mismatch is the finding. Your server says “here you are” and the page says “nothing here.”
Where they come from
Four sources cover nearly everything I have seen.
Empty category or collection pages. A category with no products in it. The template renders, the header and footer are present, the middle is blank. This is the commonest one on ecommerce sites and it multiplies quietly as stock changes.
Out-of-stock product pages that hide the product. The URL persists, the theme replaces the buy area with a notice, and what is left is a title and a breadcrumb. To Google that is an absent page wearing a 200.
Internal search results with no matches. “0 results for…” is a page that exists for every query anyone has ever typed. If those URLs are crawlable you are generating an infinite supply of them.
Thin location or service pages. Forty pages with a place name swapped and eighty words of body copy. Some will be classified as soft 404s and the rest will be crawled and left out of the index, which is the same judgement arriving through a different door.
The question that settles it
Not “how do I stop Google flagging this.” It is: should this URL exist at all?
If the answer is no, because the category is empty, the product is gone for good, or the search result page was never meant to be a page, then return a real 404 or a 410 and remove it from the sitemap. Google was right. You are agreeing with it, which is faster than disputing it.
If the answer is yes, the page needs to contain something. An empty category with three sentences about the category and a link to the parent is no longer empty. An out-of-stock product with the specification, the reviews, and a link to the replacement is a page. The fix is content, not configuration.
The wrong answer, which I have been asked for more than once, is to make the page look fuller to the classifier without making it more useful. That works on the tool and on nothing else.
The one case where Google is wrong
It happens, and it is worth knowing the shape.
Pages that are genuinely useful but very short, such as a definition, a single specification, or a location with an address and a map, can get classified as soft 404s because they look skeletal. If you have a page like that and you believe it earns its place, the fix is to make the useful part unambiguous: real body text, not just fields, and internal links pointing at it so the page does not look abandoned as well as thin.
But I would check the first explanation properly before reaching for this one. Most of the time the page is exactly as empty as Google thinks.
And most pages, empty or not, were never going to earn anything. Ahrefs looked at 14 billion pages and found 96.55% get zero traffic from Google. A soft 404 on a page in that 96.55% is not a problem to solve. It is Google and reality agreeing with each other.
How I check
Search Console, Page indexing report, the row labelled Soft 404. Then the same triage I use for everything in that report:
- Is anything in the list a page you meant to publish? Home, service, collection, product, location, blog. If none of those are there, this is platform exhaust and the work is to stop generating it.
- Open two of them. On a phone. You will usually see the answer in about four seconds.
- Check what the URL actually returns. If a deleted product is serving a 200 with an “unavailable” message, that is your template making the decision, and it is one fix for every product that ever sells out.
The short version
- A soft 404 is a 200 with nothing in it. Google is usually right.
- Four causes cover most of them: empty categories, hidden out-of-stock products, internal search results, thin spun pages.
- Ask whether the URL should exist before asking how to clear the flag.
- If it shouldn’t, serve a real 404 or 410 and take it out of the sitemap.
- If it should, put something on it. The fix is content.
- Do not pad the page to satisfy the classifier. That fools the tool and nobody else.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Technical SEO covers the crawling and indexing layer. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
