Missing pages return 200 instead of 404 (soft 404)
Medium priorityTechnical
A made-up URL on your site loads normally with status 200, so search engines can index error pages as real content.
What triggers this issue
- A random, non-existent URL on your domain returned 200 OK.
Why it matters
Search engines rely on the status code, not the text “page not found”. Soft 404s fill the index with thin duplicate pages, waste crawl budget and hide real broken links in your reports.
How to fix it
- Configure your server or framework to return a 404 status for unknown URLs, while still showing a helpful error page.
- Don’t redirect every missing URL to the homepage; Google treats that as a soft 404 too.