Soft 404s: not-found pages that still say everything is fine

Recognise the polite failure

The page title says the item was not found, the body is nearly empty, and the HTTP status is still 200. Search Console may report it as a soft 404. Users see a blank state inside a normal layout.

Single-page apps create this by serving the homepage shell for every unknown path, or by rendering an empty component without a 404 status.

Return an honest status and a useful next step

Unknown URLs should respond with 404 or 410. The HTML can still offer navigation, search, and links to the closest live guides. The status is what tells crawlers to drop the URL.

For removed pages that have a clear successor, use a 301. A soft message that says 'this moved' while returning 200 leaves the old URL in play.

• Test a nonsense URL and confirm a 404 status.
• Do not reuse the homepage title and description on error URLs.
• Keep the error page out of the sitemap.

Check the app shell, not only the server rule

A rewrite that sends every route to index.html is normal for a client-rendered site. The failure is leaving the same title, canonical, and empty body on routes that are not real pages.

Give real routes their own titles and body content. Give unknown routes a distinct not-found document and a status that is not success.

Why are soft 404s a search problem?

A 200 status asks search to treat the URL as a real document. Thin or empty documents can be indexed, and templates that look empty can make valid pages look the same.

Should a removed guide redirect or 404?

Redirect when a current page covers the same job. Use 404 or 410 when nothing replaced it, and link the error page back to the library.