Are any of your pages "not found" while returning 200?

What the soft 404 checker reads

For each page in the crawl sample, the checker reads the HTTP status, the title, the main heading and the visible text. It looks for the phrases an error page leads with, such as not found, 404, removed or no longer available, in the title or heading. It also measures how much text the page contains.

A page that returns a success status but has almost no text is treated as a likely soft 404, because an empty shell is not usable content. The checker skips the home page and pages that plainly explain error messages. The free run reads up to 20 pages, and the thin-content threshold is 400 characters of text.

How to read a soft 404 finding

A warning means the page answers with a healthy status while presenting little or no content, so a search engine may treat it as missing. The page is invisible in server error logs because nothing failed. The finding names the URL so you can open it and confirm what a visitor sees.

A clean result means no sampled page looked like an error page or an empty shell. It does not prove that every page has real content, that a search engine has indexed the sampled pages, or that a short page is intentional. A brief page that is genuinely useful can still be counted as thin, so read the finding before changing it.

Why soft 404s happen

A collection, product or category is removed without a redirect, and the template renders a bare shell with a success status. A CMS returns a friendly empty page instead of a not-found status. A filter or parameter combination matches nothing and the template still responds. All of these look healthy to a status check and empty to a reader.

A soft 404 wastes crawl budget on a page that will never be shown, and it can cause an indexed URL to be dropped without a clear error. If the page was meant to be found, the traffic disappears quietly. The failure is harder to notice than a hard 404 because nothing in the logs reports it.

Return the right status or restore the content

If the content is gone, return a real not-found status rather than a success status, so the page is treated consistently and removed cleanly. If the content moved, redirect the old URL to the closest equivalent page rather than to the home page. If the page should exist, restore its content or fix the template that renders the empty shell.

On Shopify and WooCommerce, empty collection or category pages are a frequent cause, and a theme can render a blank template when a product is missing. The guides soft 404 and not found 404 cover the fix, and soft 404s explained shows how they are produced.

When to use related checks

Use indexing check when a page is missing from search for any reason, and redirect check when a removed page should send visitors elsewhere. Use broken links for links that land on these empty pages, and freshness check for pages that have simply gone quiet.

For the redirect mechanics, redirect chains explains how to point an old URL straight at its replacement. If the empty page is also served over a redirect, fix the chain before worrying about the status.

Errors this check finds, and their fixes

• Soft 404: Why does Search Console report a soft 404 when your page returns 200?