Status codes, broken links and 404 pages

Status codes tell browsers and crawlers what happened to a request. Getting them right is simple, and getting them wrong causes some of the most common indexing problems.

Choosing the right code

Situation	Status
The page exists	200
The page moved permanently	301 or 308 to the new URL
The page is gone, with no equivalent	404 or 410
Login required	401 or 403
Temporary outage or maintenance	503, ideally with Retry-After
Too many requests	429

Soft 404s

A soft 404 is a page that tells the visitor something does not exist, or has almost no content, but returns 200. Search Console reports these in the Page indexing report.

Common causes:

• A custom error template that returns 200.
• Empty category or search result pages.
• Out-of-stock product pages reduced to "Product unavailable".
• JavaScript apps that show "not found" without changing the status code.

Google's fixes depend on the case: return 404 or 410 if the content is gone, redirect with 301 if it moved, or check with URL Inspection if the content exists but did not load for Googlebot.

Broken internal links

Links from your own pages to URLs that return 404 waste visitors' time and crawling. They usually appear after deleting pages, renaming URLs or importing content. Find them with a crawler, using the "Inlinks" view to see which pages link to each broken URL, and fix the link at its source rather than adding redirects for every typo.

A helpful 404 page

Google's guidance says a custom 404 page should help the visitor:

• Keep the normal site design and navigation.
• Say clearly that the page was not found.
• Offer search, popular categories or links to the home page.
• Return the 404 status code, so the error page itself is not indexed.

SEO-L's own 404 page is an example. Inspect any non-existent URL on this site to see its status code.