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Is a page returning success while showing nothing?

A page can return 200 and still be an empty shell. Search engines call that a soft 404: the status says success, the content says not found. Left alone it puts thousands of empty pages into the index.

Runs the Page type classification check against a bounded sample of your site, from outside your network. Nothing is stored.

What this check inspects

Shipwork reads the main text of a page and classifies it against a closed list of page types and site kinds, then reports what the page reads as. It flags a page with almost no visible text as likely empty, and it treats a page that returns 200 while reading like an error or empty page as a soft 404.

What a failure means

A soft 404 is an error here. It is thin content in the index, it wastes crawl budget, and on a store it usually means a filtered or empty collection is reachable and indexable.

How to fix it

  1. Return a real 404 status when a product or collection no longer exists.
  2. Keep empty result pages out of the index with noindex, or block the URL pattern that generates them.
  3. Make sure an empty-cart or empty-search page is not reachable as a standalone indexable URL.
  4. Do not rely on a friendly message to signal emptiness. The status code is what crawlers act on.

A typical failure, worked through

The setupA store allows filtering and serves an empty collection page with a No products found message and a 200 status when a filter combination matches nothing.

What the check reportsThe check classifies the page as an error or empty page and reports the soft 404, even though the response status is 200.

The pointCrawlers follow every filter link. Each empty combination is a thin page that can be indexed unless the pattern is blocked or noindexed.

Questions

What is a soft 404?
A URL that returns a success status but has no useful content, often an empty category, a removed product shown as a blank template, or an error message served with 200.
Why is it worse than a real 404?
A real 404 removes the URL from the crawl cleanly. A soft 404 keeps it in the index as thin content, where it competes with the pages you care about.
How do I find all of them?
Search Console reports soft 404s it finds. This check spots the pattern from outside by reading what the page actually contains.

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