Google: Have Lots Of Soft 404s In Search Console? Check Your Internal Links.

May 1, 2020 - 7:31 am 0 by

Google Soft 404

Do you have many soft 404 errors in your Google Search Console reports? Well, that might mean that you are linking to these pages internally within your site and you should check your internal links to see if this is something you can fix.

A soft 404 is a URL that returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist and also a 200-level (success) code. "In some cases, it might be a page with little or no content--for example, a sparsely populated or empty page," Google said.

John Mueller of Google said on Twitter that if you have many of these soft-404s "then it might be that it's linking to those resources internally in a way that suggests they may be web pages."

He said it is not critical that you fix these "but it's kinda suboptimal (for users & bots)" he added.

Here are those tweets:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: February 24, 2026

Feb 24, 2026 - 10:00 am
Bing Search

Microsoft Thwarts AI Prompt Injection Attacks Aimed To Manipulate AI Engines

Feb 24, 2026 - 7:51 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Support Form Requires You To Authorize Google To Make Changes

Feb 24, 2026 - 7:41 am
Bing Search

Microsoft Advertising Tests Shopping Carousel With Multiple Images Toggle

Feb 24, 2026 - 7:31 am
Google

Google Tests Removing Dates From Articles In Discover Feed

Feb 24, 2026 - 7:21 am
Bing Ads

Bing Updates Shopping Ads Design

Feb 24, 2026 - 7:11 am
 
Previous Story: Google: We Exists Because Of Users, Not Advertisers