What does soft 404 error mean? Are Soft 404s bad?

[ShreeVaghani]

How do I fix a soft 404 error?
What is 404 error message used for? How do I avoid 404 error?

[DavidMull]

A soft 404 is a URL that returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist and also a 200 (success) status code. Returning a success status code, rather than 404 (not found) , 410 (gone) , or 301 (permanent redirect) , is a bad practice.

[mialucas297156]

The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with a given server, but the server could not find what was requested.

Basically, Soft 404 is a page that looks like a 404 but returns a HTTP status code 200. I mean, the website might show a “Page Not Found”-style page, but search engines such as Google will see the page and think that it’s an actual live page.

[firstdigiadd]

A soft 404 error is when the website server sends a two hundred OK fame for a web page, however Google thinks the web page need to go back a 404 code. This is due to the fact Google has detected that the web page looks as if an blunders or has little or no content material on it.
Having a internet site with pages complete of mistakes will effect your move slowly efficiency: the manner Google crawls your site. You don’t need Google’s bots spending time crawling pages that aren’t intended to be for your site. Your move slowly price range is higher spent elsewhere.

[ShreeVaghani]

How do I fix a soft 404 error?
What is 404 error message used for? How do I avoid 404 error?

Hello,

"A soft 404 is a URL that returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist and also a 200 (success) status code. In some cases, it might be a page with little or no content (for example, a sparsely populated or empty page). A success status code tells search engines that there's a real page at that URL. By failing to serve a 404 status code, your website is telling search engines that there's a real page at the URL they're attempting to access. As a result, the URL you've deleted (with no content) will be crawled and indexed, thus wasting valuable crawl budget on redundant pages."