How to Handle Soft 404 Errors in Google Search Console

A 404 error is healthy. It tells Google: “This page is gone, stop trying to index it.”

A Soft 404, however, is toxic. A soft 404 occurs when your server returns a 200 OK (Success) status code, but the content on the page says “Product Not Found,” “Nothing to see here,” or is simply blank.

Google’s algorithm tries to be helpful—it recognizes the discrepancy between the success status and the empty content, labels it a “Soft 404,” and removes it from the index.

The SEO Impact of Soft 404s#

When your site returns a 200 OK status code for a missing page, it wastes your crawl budget and creates a poor user experience. Over time, these errors can dilute your domain authority and negatively impact your site’s overall indexing coverage.

Finding Soft 404s#

GSC does not always flag every Soft 404 perfectly. If you have a poorly designed e-commerce store, you might have thousands of out-of-stock product pages returning 200 OK status codes without any content, confusing Google and bloating your index.

Redirects vs. Content Updates#

If you find a high volume of Soft 404s, you need to decide how to handle them based on the page’s historical value.

1. If the Page Had Traffic: If the page used to rank or have backlinks, do not just leave it as a 404. Find the most relevant page remaining on your site and 301 redirect the Soft 404 to it. This preserves the link equity.
2. If the Page is Junk: If these Soft 404s are part of a massive, low-value category (like old search result pages), you must ensure they return a proper 404 or 410 status code, not a 200 OK.

Automating the Fix with Kong Metrics#

To clean up these errors at scale, you need to see the impact of these pages on your overall performance.

Use Kong Metrics’ URL Clustering tool to group your Soft 404s. If you see that 80% of your Soft 404s are coming from a single outdated subfolder, you can quickly write a global redirect rule for that entire cluster, rather than hunting them down one by one.

Soft 404s are a symptom of an unmaintained site architecture. Clean them up, redirect your valuable authority, and you will see an immediate improvement in your overall site health and crawl efficiency.

Improve your site maintenance strategy with Manual Actions Security GSC, use URL Clustering for SEO to manage large-scale redirect mapping, and check GSC Index Coverage Errors Explained for a comprehensive overview of indexing health.