What Is a Soft 404 in SEO?
Use Cases
Identifying and fixing soft 404s helps Googlebot spend more time on valuable content instead of worthless placeholder pages.
SEO teams use audit tools to detect soft 404s and prevent them from bloating analytics or skewing index coverage reports.
AI agents flag soft 404 behavior on large-scale sites to assist in automated quality assurance pipelines.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What causes a soft 404 error?
They’re often caused by pages showing 'not found' messages without returning a proper 404 or 410 status code.
Why are soft 404s bad for SEO?
They waste crawl budget and can lead to poor indexing, affecting your site’s organic visibility.
How can I find soft 404s on my site?
Use Google Search Console’s Coverage report or SEO audit tools that simulate search engine bots.
What's the difference between a hard and soft 404?
Not usually. They are typically the result of incorrect implementation or content removal without proper response codes.
Can soft 404s be intentional?
Yes, users landing on low-value pages will likely bounce, negatively impacting UX metrics tied to SEO.
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