What makes a 200 a soft 404
The status and the content disagree. The server says the page exists; what it serves is an empty template, a "no longer available" notice, a stray error message, or a shell with no text. Google classifies this as a soft 404. It reads the content, not the status code, and a page with nothing to rank is not found, whatever the status line claims.
The Shopify causes
- Retired products left published. Inventory zeroed and the template renders an empty shell instead of a redirect or a proper unavailable state.
- Renamed handles. The old URL now 404s (that is the honest version) or worse, redirects to the collection, which reads as a product URL with no product.
- Collections with zero live products rendering the boilerplate layout around "no products found."
- Search and filter URLs that answer 200 with an empty result set and get indexed.
Redirecting every dead product URL to the home page is a common "fix" that makes things worse: Google reads the destination, finds no product, and records a soft 404 with extra steps. Redirect to the nearest equivalent product or collection, or let it 404 honestly.
Why search engines care
Crawl budget is finite, and a 200-with-no-content wastes it twice: the crawler fetches the page, spends its budget, gets nothing, and learns the site rewards fetches with emptiness. Enough soft 404s and the whole site\u2019s crawl quality estimate degrades: the failure of a few pages taxes every other page\u2019s recrawl rate.
Fix: restore, redirect, or really 404
- Restore where the product returns: restocked or renamed back to its original handle.
- Redirect to the nearest equivalent where it is gone for good: the collection or a successor product, never the bare homepage.
- Return a real 404 or 410 where nothing equivalent exists. Honest signals get processed faster than pretend-200s.
- Remove the URLs from the sitemap if they are gone, and check the template fix catches future retirements automatically.
Run the free soft-404 check to see which of the pages it checks answer 200 while reading like a not-found page. Related: redirect chains · soft 404s on Shopify, deeper
Shipwork requests the pages it checks from outside your network and reads the visible text of each, reporting 200s whose content reads as a not-found page: the mismatch Google treats as thin. Free, no account, no signup. Paste your store address.
Check for soft 404sQuestions
What is a soft 404?
Do soft 404s hurt my whole site?
Is redirecting dead products to the homepage OK?
How does the check detect soft 404s?
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