Soft 404
A page that answers HTTP 200 while telling a human the content is missing.
What Soft 404 means
The status line and the content disagree, and the crawler believes the status line until something else corrects it.
Where Soft 404 comes up on this site
- HTTP status codes for crawlers: what a 200 can hideA working website answers the second request differently: a 404 page, a redirect, a soft 404 with different bytes.
Definitions that name Soft 404
SKILL.md · 404 and 410 status codes
Related terms in Indexing and discovery
Whether a page can be found and kept, separately from whether it can be fetched.
nosnippet · max-snippet · max-image-preview · unavailable_after · noimageindex · index coverage · canonical · noindex · X-Robots-Tag · orphan page · E-E-A-T · E-E-A-T proxies · topical authority · case consistency · accessibility structure · landmark region · accessible name · skip link · main landmark · alt attribute · form control name · duplicate id · IndexNow · faceted navigation · thin content · duplicate content · near-duplicate · boilerplate · MinHash · shingle · dead anchor · placeholder content · image placeholder · alt text · EXIF
Questions about Soft 404
What is Soft 404?
A page that answers HTTP 200 while telling a human the content is missing.
What does Soft 404 not show or guarantee?
A page that answers HTTP 200 while telling a human the content is missing.
Which area of the glossary does Soft 404 belong to?
Indexing and discovery: Whether a page can be found and kept, separately from whether it can be fetched.
← topical authority · case consistency →
See it in the full glossary · 772 terms across 19 areas.
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