Soft 404s, Crawl Budget, and Site Health: Detection, Impact, and Fixes

Published:
by Wayne Smith

Soft 404 errors waste link equity, drain crawl resources, and confuse topical authority, weakening a site’s visibility. Instead of indexing valuable pages, search engines burn crawl budget on low-value or misconfigured content. Left unresolved, soft 404s can delay the discovery of new content, dilute rankings, and signal that a site is poorly managed.

Unlike real 404s, which clearly indicate missing content, soft 404s return a “200 OK” status but provide little or no value. To search engines, this appears as a configuration error; to visitors, it feels like a broken or low-quality page.

This guide explains what soft 404s are, how they differ from true 404s, and how Google and other engines handle them. It explores their impact on crawl equity, topical authority, and user experience—and outlines practical methods to detect, fix, and prevent them. Soft 404s are often created by misconfigured CMS systems and may reveal hidden topical dilution issues within a site.

False positive soft 404 errors and a broader definition

Sometimes what gets flagged as a soft 404 isn’t really one—it’s thin content being mistaken for an error. Since thin pages share many of the same symptoms (low value, little unique information, wasted crawl resources), detection tools often lump them together.

It usually makes sense to address both at the same time. The same fixes—noindexing, redirects, or consolidation—work for thin content as well as soft 404s. Looking at them together avoids chasing narrow definitions and keeps the focus on improving crawl efficiency and index quality.

Take a product page with only a placeholder image, a short description, and a price. For a software driver, that’s all the information a buyer really needs—but search engines may still flag it as thin. Adding a canonical tag to a stronger product hub page solves the problem and recovers crawl budget. Other options like a permanent noindex can also work, but canonical is often the cleanest solution in cases like this.

Overall website SEO Health or quality KPI

Website “health” or “quality” is often debated in SEO because quality is a subjective term. Algorithms, however, are rules-based systems that rely on measurable signals. Soft 404s fall into this category: they are objectively detectable, diagnosable, and fixable.

The effect on real visitors is harder to quantify — bounce rates or short sessions might hint at poor experiences, but “user interaction” with thin or broken pages isn’t something search engines can measure directly in a consistent, rules-based way.

In Google Search Console (Page Indexing), several technical health KPIs provide visibility into these issues:

Additional indexation-related health KPIs include:

These ratios and distributions don’t provide absolute measures of “quality,” but they do serve as directional indicators. Together with soft 404 counts, they help diagnose whether a site may be signaling to search engines that it is poorly managed or filled with thin content.

Understanding Soft 404 Errors

A soft 404 is a page that exists but provides little or no unique value. Instead of returning a proper 404 status code, it serves a thin, placeholder, or skeleton page that resembles a 404 error. This confuses both users and search engines. These pages aren’t canonical errors or exact duplicates, yet they still drain crawl budget and are often excluded from the index. Worse, they waste crawl resources that could have been spent on important content.

In the technical sense, a soft 404 is a page that should have returned a true 404 response but did not. In a broader, pragmatic sense, it includes any page that resolves with a 200 status code but provides minimal or no substantive content from the perspective of search engine algorithms—sometimes flagged as “noindex.” While thin content pages are not strictly soft 404s, they produce equivalent challenges for crawl efficiency and index management, making it operationally sensible to address them in the same workflow.

For example, say your site’s internal search generates thousands of parameterized URLs with “no results.” To users, those feel like dead ends. Crawlers may label them as soft 404s. Since they drain crawl budget, it’s cleaner to return a true 404 “Not Found” response, allowing search engines to focus on high-value pages.

Another case: maybe you’ve got 100 query URLs, each leading to a page with only a single thin result. To a user, they don’t look broken. But to a crawler, they waste resources and lack a strong canonical. In these cases, applying a noindex is often best, while disallow rules in robots.txt can be used strategically to keep low-value variations from being crawled in the first place.

If soft 404–like pages do make it into search results, they’ll usually be dropped over time. Search engines have their own treatments for detecting and excluding them. Still, when a site generates thousands of low-value URLs, it signals poor site management. That can dilute topical authority, burn crawl equity, and delay the discovery of content that actually matters.

Security and topical authority concerns and risks

Improper handling of dynamic URLs or query strings by applications or CMS platforms is a common source of soft 404s, introducing both security and SEO risks:

Key Differences between 404 and Soft 404 Errors

A real 404 and a soft 404 differ in both technical response and how they reflect site quality. A real 404 signals a missing page and often points to a linking problem — if a site has many links to 404s, it may indicate poor maintenance. A soft 404, by contrast, indicates that the destination page itself is low value or that site navigation is misconfigured.

A real 404 returns the correct 404 status code, clearly telling search engines the page does not exist and should not be indexed. A soft 404 returns a 200 (or other non-error) status code but appears as a missing page to search engines.

Serving a “page not found” message is standard, but when search engines detect many thin or repetitive pages that should have returned 404s, they may interpret it as a configuration issue. Because soft 404s do not send the correct status code, search engines continue to crawl them, wasting crawl budget.

Side note: 404 vs 410

Search engines can treat a 404 status as a temporary signal. For example, placeholder pages (e.g., Wikipedia pages linked before creation) may continue to be crawled until the link is confirmed invalid. This behavior helps ensure that pages aren’t prematurely dropped from the index, especially when link equity is involved.

From experience, external links pointing to a 404 usually aren’t harmful to the destination site; the page containing the link is more likely to reflect maintenance issues. That said, a large number of invalid external links can still consume crawl resources, and a 404 signal might not resolve as quickly but checking 404 pages is a low priority.

Google Search Central: Large site owner's guide to managing your crawl budget

A 410 Gone status signals definitively that the destination page no longer exists and will never exist. Using a 410 can accelerate the removal of these pages from crawl queues, helping preserve crawl budget. Overall, soft 404s tend to consume more crawl resources than standard 404s, so it’s worth keeping an eye on them.

Locating the source of Soft-404 errors

HTTP/HTTPS servers like Apache, Nginx, and LiteSpeed deliver pages according to W3C and HTTP standards; by default, they return correct status codes and do not generate soft 404s. The issue typically originates higher in the stack.

Soft 404s usually arise from how applications, CMS platforms, or plugins handle requests. Many CMS systems dynamically generate content and may intercept or “take over” requests for URLs that do not actually exist on the server. Instead of returning a proper 404, they serve thin or placeholder content with a 200 OK status, creating a soft 404.

Imagine a CMS that automatically creates category or tag pages. Even if the category is empty, it might still serve a page with a 200 status. Search engines see that as thin or low-value content, which often ends up being treated as a soft 404.

Don’t assume your CMS is handling soft 404s correctly—it’s easy to overlook. It’s worth auditing each system based on its server configuration and dynamic content rules to make sure pages return the proper status codes and that your crawl budget isn’t being wasted.

Search Engine – Specific Treatment of Wasted Crawl Budget

Search engines do not disclose precise details about a site’s crawl budget. Fortunately, a full understanding of crawl budget is not required to address soft 404s — removing or noindexing low-value pages is the priority. Still, proxy signals can help site owners identify where crawl resources are being spent:

These tools allow site owners to diagnose crawl inefficiencies, highlight soft 404s, and ensure search engines prioritize high-value content without needing exact crawl budget figures.

Categorizing Soft 404 Errors and Thin Content

Soft 404 errors should be addressed because they consume crawl budget and can impact a site’s SEO, regardless of why they exist. In some cases, they can be reframed as thin content. They can be categorized based on the action required to resolve them.

Temporary Noindex Instead of a Soft 404

Rule-based thin content pages, such as a newly created Wiki-type entry, may initially return a 200 status code but contain little or no substantive information. In these cases, applying a temporary noindex tag is preferable to allowing them to be treated as soft 404s. This is a practical SEO consideration rather than an official Google guideline, as Google does not directly address this use case. It allows search engines to crawl the pages without ranking them for incomplete or irrelevant content, which could dilute the site’s topical authority. It also signals that such pages are low priority, ensuring high-value content is discovered and indexed first.

This approach does not directly optimize crawl budget in the narrow sense but reframes the problem more broadly as thin content. Pages returning 404 (not found), 301 (redirect), or 304 (content unchanged) generally consume fewer crawl resources, as crawlers tend to move on quickly. In contrast, soft 404s can disproportionately drain crawl efficiency and delay the discovery of valuable content. Noindexing thin content preserves link equity while preventing premature or irrelevant rankings.

Importantly, links to a noindexed page do not denote a broken link from the referring page, avoiding negative maintenance signals.

The drawback of a temporary noindex is that it may delay the page’s eventual inclusion in search results. Because the page is treated as low priority, it may require manual submission or additional signals once substantive content is added before it is indexed.

Using 302 temporary redirects

Seasonal or time-sensitive pages, such as Christmas or Black Friday specials, can become thin or resemble soft 404 errors once the event has passed. In these cases, applying a 302 temporary redirect to the main category page helps preserve link equity and ensures both users and crawlers land on relevant content. Google’s guidelines support the use of 302s for temporary redirection, though they do not explicitly address this use case as a soft 404 solution.

A 302 is also suitable for category pages that exist in structure but are not yet populated with products or articles. This signals to search engines that the original page may return in the future and should not be treated as permanently removed.

The drawback is that once the 302 redirect is removed, the seasonal or category page may require manual submission or additional signals before being indexed again.

Many in the SEO community note that long-term use of a 302 may eventually be interpreted by search engines as a 301 (permanent) redirect. However, even “permanent” redirects are not absolute—bots often continue crawling 301s long after processing them, since site owners sometimes reverse redirects or restore content.

Using a 301 Permanent Redirect

When categories are consolidated or old pages no longer have content, the original URLs often become thin or effectively soft 404 pages. A common and practical approach is to use a 301 permanent redirect from the old URL to the page that now holds the content. This preserves link equity and helps users and search engines land on a relevant page instead of a low-value or empty page.

It’s worth noting that even with a 301 redirect, crawlers may occasionally revisit the old URL, so it’s a good idea to ensure the redirect points to a closely related page. If no suitable replacement exists, other options like a 404 or noindex might be more appropriate.

Using a canonical for false positives and thin content

First, I have to admit—this is where I sigh. I wish canonical tags worked under a consistent legal doctrine, a single, clear rulebook that every search engine followed. In reality, each engine interprets canonicalization its own way. Still, it’s worth understanding how to handle it.

The first case is pretty straightforward: a sign-up page with almost no content. To search engines, it’s basically just a form sitting on a skeleton page, so it can get flagged as thin or even mistaken for a soft 404. The fix isn’t to simply ‘relabel’ it as thin content—that doesn’t solve the problem. What helps is sending stronger signals that the page is real: a self-referencing canonical tag, and ideally, some internal links pointing to it. Those extra signals tell crawlers this page matters and shouldn’t be treated as a ‘not found.’

One thing to keep in mind: user engagement signals are mostly proxies. Think about the sitelinks you sometimes see under a brand search—those come from how people interact with the site, not from the sign-up page itself. So even with the canonical and internal links, a bare-bones page may still take time before it reliably shows up in search results. That’s normal—it just means the page needs a little more support before search engines fully trust it.

The second case is where things get tricky. By the book, canonicalization is meant only for near-duplicate content. But in reality, Google often interprets it differently. Take a shopping cart system: on the purchase page, there’s a link for more product details. Now imagine the category is ‘Unified Thread Standard (UTS)’ nuts and bolts, and the details page for a #6 nut is basically a blank screen. Technically, that’s not a duplicate—it’s just thin—but to a crawler, it can look like a soft 404 or low-value page.

A close reading of Google’s canonicalization guidance — “When Google finds multiple pages that seem to be the same or the primary content is very similar, it chooses the page that... is objectively the most complete and useful for search users, and marks it as canonical.” — suggests that in cases like this, using the canonical on the thin product detail page to either the product page or the broader category page (whichever is objectively more complete) is a practical solution.

UC Davis’s canonical tag guide also follows this interruptation: “A large portion of the duplicate page’s content should be present on the canonical version.” This stretches the classic definition but aligns with how Google often treats canonicals in practice.

An important consideration: Google isn’t the only search engine. If you want to avoid ambiguity or conflicts, noindexing thin content is always a safe alternative.