A soft 404 happens when a server shows a 'not found' message, an empty search result or near-blank content while still returning 200.
Search engines treat these as errors in disguise and may ignore them, but the page still consumes crawl budget.
Soft 404s hide real problems from reporting and can clutter the index with empty pages.
VisibilityKit Crawler records the status code alongside content signals such as word count and title for each URL. Pages that return 200 but have error-like titles or almost no content stand out for review.
Return a real 404 or 410 for missing pages, redirect to a relevant page if one exists, or add real content if the page should exist.
Usually a CMS or framework renders an error template without setting the status code.
The HTTP status a server returns when the requested page does not exist.
Three-digit codes a server returns with every response to say whether the request succeeded, redirected or failed.
Pages with little useful content, such as near-empty templates, doorway pages or boilerplate-only pages.
Whether a page is able to be included in a search engine's index.
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