Indexing & crawlability
Soft 404: HTTP 200 on a not-found page
One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on every page of a site in a free audit.
- How serious
- Serious. Can stop pages from appearing in Google, or from working for visitors. Fix these first.
- Based on
- Google's own documentation
What is wrong
Your website is returning HTTP 200 (success) on pages that do not actually exist. This is called a soft 404. Search engines expect missing pages to return a 404 or 410 status code instead. When a page loads normally but contains no real content, Google cannot tell whether you meant to delete it or whether it is just broken.
Why it costs you
Google wastes crawl budget on these pages, revisiting them repeatedly because the success code suggests they might eventually have content. This means fewer real pages get indexed, and your site's presence in search results shrinks. Visitors who land on these pages see an error message or a generic template, and they leave without converting.
How to fix it
Check your site's error handling. If a page does not exist, your server must return a 404 status code. If you have permanently removed a page, return 410 instead. Do this in your server configuration (the `.htaccess` file for Apache, or your web host's error handling settings) or in your page template—whichever generates these responses. Test by requesting a known missing URL and confirming the status code with your browser's developer tools or a command-line tool like `curl`.
What the audit tests
- A page that says "not found" answers with a real 404, not a 200
Check your site
Run a free audit of up to 300 pages. No card needed.
Start a free audit