Soft 404
A page returning success while showing nothing useful: no results, product removed, content unavailable.
Analogy Mental model
The restaurant is open, the lights are on, and once you are inside you find a sign saying closed. You made the trip for nothing.
In practice What you actually do
Return the real status. An empty search result, a delisted product, an expired listing: these are 404 or 410, and the server should say so. If the URL must stay alive, return 200 with genuinely useful alternatives on it.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
A 200 wrapped around an empty page spends crawl budget on nothing and confuses the index, because the engine has to work out for itself that the page is worthless. Tell it, and it stops coming.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →