Technical SEO FAQ · Redirects, Status Codes, Sitemaps & Robots

What is the SEO impact of soft 404s?

A soft 404 is a URL that technically returns a successful response but represents missing or nonexistent content.

Example:

200 OK

with:

"Product not found."

Google may treat such URLs differently from normal pages.

Soft 404s can create poor indexation signals and unnecessary crawling.

For genuinely removed resources, return the appropriate 404/410 behavior or redirect when a relevant replacement exists.


Sources


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