Indexing problem guide
The page returns 200 but behaves like a 404
A soft 404 is a page that technically returns 200 OK but gives search engines little evidence that a real resource exists. Google can classify an empty template, “item not found” screen, thin product page or JavaScript shell as a soft 404 and leave it out of the index. Changing the status code alone is not enough if the URL is supposed to contain meaningful content.
Start here
Run the Check the live response before changing templates. It checks what a public crawler can see; Google Search Console remains authoritative for Google’s own indexing decision.
The patterns that trigger it
- A missing product or article renders the normal layout with an empty body and still returns 200.
- A single-page app sends the same app shell for every route, while the actual content arrives late or fails for crawlers.
- A category or tag page contains one short sentence, no useful links and a large amount of repeated navigation.
- A deleted URL redirects to the homepage, which hides the fact that the requested resource no longer exists.
Look at the response Google receives, the final URL after redirects and the server-rendered text. A page that looks full after a click or client-side API call may still be an empty response to a first fetch.
Choose the correct outcome
If the resource exists, return 200 and provide useful, unique content in the initial response: the title, primary answer, key facts, and links to related pages. If it was permanently removed and has no replacement, return 404 or 410. If it moved, use one direct 301 to the genuinely equivalent destination.
Do not use a 200 status to keep a friendly error page, and do not redirect every missing URL to the homepage. Those shortcuts create a large set of URLs that are technically live but provide no answer, which wastes crawl attention and obscures the real content gap.
A practical recovery checklist
- Fetch the URL without cookies and inspect status, final URL, content type, title, canonical and visible text.
- Compare the missing route with a healthy sibling route. Check whether a middleware, API request or deployment rewrite is dropping the unique content.
- For real pages, add enough original information to answer the query and link to the next useful step. For gone pages, return the honest status code.
- Remove soft-404 URLs from the sitemap, fix internal links, and request inspection only after the response is correct.
IndexNow can announce a changed URL to participating engines after the repair, but it cannot make a thin 200 page valuable or force Google to index it.
Not sure this is your problem? Start from how Google indexing works and what to expect, which covers the whole process and links to every diagnosis from one place.