A soft 404 is a URL that returns an HTTP 200 "OK" status while actually presenting a page that has no real content or tells the user the content is missing — an empty search-results page, a "no products found" listing, a near-blank template, or a generic "page not found" message served with a success status instead of a real 404.
Definition
A soft 404 is a URL that returns an HTTP 200 "OK" status while actually presenting a page that has no real content or tells the user the content is missing — an empty search-results page, a "no products found" listing, a near-blank template, or a generic "page not found" message served with a success status instead of a real 404. Search engines detect the mismatch between the success status and the empty or error-like content and label the URL a soft 404, then decline to index it and may flag it in Search Console.
Soft 404s are a problem because they waste crawl budget (the crawler keeps revisiting a URL that claims to be valid), they can appear in reports as indexable pages when they are not, and at scale they signal low quality. The fix is to make the response honest: return a genuine 404 or 410 for content that does not exist, and make sure pages that should have content actually do.
In context
On iGaming affiliate sites, soft 404s commonly come from a few patterns: filtered listing URLs where a facet combination has no matching operators still returning a 200 with an empty grid; expired promotion or event pages that now show a "this offer has ended" stub with a success status; localfor-market pages that were generated but never populated; and a custom "not found" design that the server delivers with a 200. Each of these should either be given real content, redirected to a relevant live page, or made to return a true error status.
Finding them: Search Console's index report lists URLs classified as soft 404, and a site crawl can flag thin 200 pages and pages whose content matches known error templates. The remediation is per case — populate, redirect (301 to the closest useful page), or return 404/410 — and then confirm in Search Console that the soft-404 count drops.
For a large glossary or content build, the relevant checks are that no term or listing URL is published before it has its full content, that removed or merged terms return 301 to their replacement rather than a 200 stub, and that the internal search and any empty-state pages are not left crawlable with a success status.
Worked example
An affiliate finds 300 soft 404s in Search Console, mostly empty facet-combination listings and ended-promotion stubs. It sets empty facets to return 404, 301-redirects ended promotions to the current offers page, and confirms every glossary URL has full content before publishing.
The soft-404 count falls to near zero and crawl focuses on live pages.
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