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.
Related questions
- How do redirect chains affect SEO and crawling?
- How do you handle conflicting canonical signals?
- How do you troubleshoot incorrect canonicalization at scale?
- How would you handle thousands of URLs returning 200 but displaying "not found"?
- How would you identify redirect loops?
- What happens when canonical tags point to 404 pages?
- What happens when canonical tags point to redirected URLs?
- What would you check after a large-scale URL migration?
- When should you use a 301 versus a 302?
