Soft 404

A soft 404 is a page that tells the user a resource is missing while still returning HTTP status 200 OK (or another success code). Soft 404s confuse crawlers, link checkers, and humans trying to measure Dead links, and they can replace former content without a clean archival signal.

See also

• Dead link
• Link rot
• Content drift

Sources

• Search-engine webmaster documentation on soft 404s.
• Web-archiving QA notes.