How to Fix: No soft 404 errors

No soft 404 errors is an important SEO check in the Crawlability & Indexing category. This is a high-priority SEO issue that should be addressed soon. It has a significant impact on your SEO performance.

A soft 404 is a page that tells the browser everything is fine while showing the user nothing. The server returns a 200 OK status, but the content is effectively “not found” — an empty search result, a deleted product’s placeholder, a category with no items, a thin “nothing here” page. Google’s word for this is a soft 404, and it flags them because they waste crawl budget and pollute the index with pages that have no reason to exist. The dishonest status code is the whole problem: the page says “success” when it means “empty.”

Where soft 404s come from in WordPress

They are rarely created on purpose. The usual sources: a deleted post or product whose theme shows a friendly “content not found” page but still returns 200; empty internal search results pages that got indexed; WooCommerce categories emptied of stock but left live; a redirect plugin sending dead URLs to the homepage instead of returning a proper 404 or 410; and thin pages Google simply decides are too empty to be real, and reclassifies as soft 404 in Search Console. The through-line is a mismatch between what the page contains and what its status code claims.

Why it matters for SEO

• Crawl budget leaks. Every soft 404 Google crawls and re-crawls is attention stolen from your real pages. On a large site this adds up fast.
• Index bloat lowers quality perception. Empty pages sitting in the index dilute the overall signal of the site and can drag on how it is assessed.
• It hides real problems. A page that should be a hard 404 but returns 200 masks broken links and lets dead URLs linger, undetected, in your structure.

What I would do about it

Difficulty Level: MEDIUM – This fix requires some technical knowledge or familiarity with WordPress settings and plugins.

Estimated Time: 30 min

1. Find them in Search Console. The Pages report under Indexing lists URLs excluded as “Soft 404.” Start there — it is Google telling you exactly which pages it thinks are empty.
2. Match the status to the truth. Content genuinely gone for good should return a real 404 or a 410 Gone, not a 200. Content that moved should 301-redirect to the true replacement — never a blanket redirect of every dead URL to the homepage, which Google itself treats as a soft 404.
3. Handle empty listings deliberately. A temporarily empty category can stay with a clear message; a permanently empty one should be removed or redirected. Add noindex to internal search results pages so they never enter the index in the first place.
4. Fix thin pages that got reclassified. Where Google called a real page a soft 404 because it was too thin, the fix is content, not a status code — give the page enough substance to justify existing, or consolidate it into a stronger one.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Redirecting every deleted URL to the homepage — Google reads that as a soft 404.
• Serving a “not found” message on a page that still returns a 200 status.
• Letting internal search results and empty archives get indexed instead of noindexing them.
• Treating a soft 404 caused by thin content as a redirect problem rather than a content one.

Recommended Tools & Plugins

• Yoast SEO – Comprehensive SEO plugin with built-in checks
• Rank Math – Feature-rich SEO plugin with detailed analysis
• Google Search Console – Free tool to monitor your site’s search presence
• SEO Roadmap – Complete SEO audit and action plan tool

This guide is part of the SEO Roadmap knowledge base – your complete resource for WordPress SEO optimization.