The Website Mistake That Can Hide Your Whole Site From Google

A soft 404 error happens when a missing page on your website returns a ‘200 OK’ status code instead of the correct ‘404 Not Found’. This tells search engines the page exists when it doesn’t, wasting their crawl budget and potentially hiding your real pages from search results. We recently fixed this exact issue on a live client site where 15% of pages were affected.

What is a soft 404 and why does it matter

A normal 404 error clearly tells visitors and search engines that a page doesn’t exist. A soft 404 shows a ‘page not found’ message but incorrectly reports everything is fine with a 200 status code. This is common on modern static sites and single-page applications where the server always returns 200 and lets JavaScript handle routing.

Search engines will keep crawling these non-existent pages, wasting time that could be spent indexing your real content. Over time, this can reduce how much of your site appears in search results.

How to check if your site has soft 404s

Run this test in your terminal:

curl -I https://yourdomain.com/this-page-does-not-exist

Look for HTTP/2 200 in the response. If you see this for a non-existent page, you have a soft 404 problem. You can also check Google Search Console under Coverage > Excluded > Soft 404.

How to fix soft 404s on static sites

For static sites, configure your server to return proper 404 status codes. On Netlify, add a _redirects file with:

/* /404.html 404

For single-page apps, ensure your JavaScript router sends the correct status code when routes don’t match. Most frameworks have plugins for this, like React Router’s static router.

The difference between hard and soft 404s

A hard 404 correctly tells everyone the page is gone. A soft 404 shows a ‘not found’ message but lies about the status. Search engines prefer honesty - they’ll stop wasting time on hard 404s but keep crawling soft ones indefinitely.

Check your site today - this invisible issue could be hiding your best content from search. If you need help diagnosing or fixing it, get in touch. For more technical SEO issues, see our guide on how AI visibility works.