Shopify Soft 404s: What They Are and Why They're Worse Than Real 404s

Key Takeaways

• A soft 404 is a URL that returns a 200 (success) status but serves content Google treats as meaningless or missing
• They’re harder to detect than hard 404s because they don’t appear as errors in normal monitoring
• Redirecting broken URLs to your homepage is the most common cause of soft 404s on Shopify
• Google Search Console reports soft 404s under “Page indexing” — check there if your coverage looks off
• Fixing soft 404s requires fixing the underlying issue, not just adding more redirects

Most Shopify merchants have heard of 404 errors. The “Page not found” screen is obvious — something’s broken and you can see it. Soft 404s are different. They look fine on the surface, they don’t show up in the same monitoring dashboards, and they quietly accumulate while suppressing your rankings.

Understanding soft 404s is important because the most popular “fix” for hard 404s — redirecting everything to your homepage — is the most common cause of soft 404s.

What Is a Soft 404?

An HTTP status code tells browsers and search engines what happened when they requested a URL:

• 200: Success — the page loaded correctly
• 404: Not found — no page exists here

A soft 404 is a URL that returns a 200 status code — technically telling Google it loaded successfully — but serves content that Google determines is functionally a “not found” page.

Google decides something is a soft 404 when it looks at the page content and concludes it isn’t actually useful or relevant to the URL that was requested. This can happen in several ways.

How Soft 404s Appear on Shopify

The Homepage Redirect Problem

The most common cause. When merchants redirect all broken URLs to their homepage, every one of those redirects is a potential soft 404.

If /products/discontinued-boots redirects to your homepage, Google follows that redirect, lands on your homepage, and thinks: “This URL was supposed to be a boots product page. This is a homepage. This doesn’t match.” It records the original URL as a soft 404.

This is why the advice to redirect all 404s to your homepage is counterproductive — you’re replacing hard 404s with soft 404s, which are harder to fix and equally damaging.

Deleted Products Still Appearing in Collections

When you delete a product in Shopify, the product URL returns a 404. But if your collection pages still show that product (via cached collection data or theme bugs), Shopify might serve a page that appears to be a product page but has no actual product content. Google reads this as a soft 404.

Out-of-Stock Pages with No Useful Content

If an out-of-stock product page shows nothing except “This product is unavailable” with no description, images, or related products, Google may classify it as a soft 404 — the URL exists and returns 200, but the content has no value.

Thin or Duplicate Template Pages

Shopify themes sometimes generate template-based pages with very little unique content — particularly for collections with only one or two products, or automatically-generated tag pages (/collections/shirts/womens). If these pages have little content, Google may treat them as soft 404s and suppress them in search.

Search Result Pages That Get Indexed

Shopify’s internal search creates URLs like /search?q=boots. These shouldn’t be indexed — they have no stable content — but if they get crawled, Google can flag them as soft 404s. Proper robots.txt configuration or canonical tags prevent this.

Why Soft 404s Are Worse Than Hard 404s

Hard 404s are visible. They show up in Google Search Console’s coverage report under “Not found (404)”. You can see them, count them, and fix them.

Soft 404s hide. They show up in a different section of Google Search Console — under “Page indexing” as “Soft 404” — which many merchants never check. A store can have hundreds of soft 404s without the merchant realising.

Hard 404s are honest. Google understands that content gets deleted. A hard 404 on a URL that’s been dead for months will eventually drop out of Google’s index cleanly.

Soft 404s create confusion. Google has to work harder to determine what’s happening. The URL is returning 200, so it may keep re-crawling it trying to find useful content. This wastes crawl budget more than a clean 404 does.

Soft 404s persist. Because they return 200 rather than 404, they don’t age out of Google’s index the same way. They can sit there for a long time, consuming crawl budget and index space without contributing to your rankings.

How to Find Soft 404s on Your Shopify Store

Google Search Console

1. Go to Search Console → Indexing → Pages
2. Look for “Soft 404” in the “Why pages aren’t indexed” section
3. Click through to see which URLs are affected

This is the most direct source, but there’s a delay — Google needs to crawl the pages and classify them before they appear here.

Crawl Your Store

A site crawler (Screaming Frog, Sitebulb) will flag pages that look like soft 404s — pages with minimal content, pages that redirect to unrelated destinations, duplicate template pages.

Check Your Redirect List

Export your URL redirects from Shopify Admin and look for any that point to your homepage. These are almost certainly creating soft 404s.

How to Fix Soft 404s

The fix depends on the cause.

For Homepage Redirects

Remove the redirect to your homepage. For each broken URL:

• If a relevant replacement page exists, redirect to that page instead
• If no replacement exists, let the URL return a genuine 404
• Find the internal links pointing to that broken URL and update them to point to the correct destination

For Deleted Products Still in Collections

Make sure your collections don’t reference deleted products. In Shopify, this usually resolves itself, but caching layers or custom theme code can cause stale references.

For Thin or Empty Pages

Either add meaningful content to the page, or use a noindex tag to tell Google not to index it. For tag-generated collection pages with little content, noindex is often the right call.

For Indexed Search Result Pages

Add /search to your robots.txt disallow list, or ensure your theme applies canonical tags to search result pages pointing back to your main search page.

For All Cases: Fix the Broken Links

Regardless of the specific cause, soft 404s usually trace back to broken internal links that were never cleaned up. A blog post linking to a deleted product, a collection page referencing discontinued items, a page pointing to a URL that changed.

Relink scans your entire Shopify store for broken internal links — the source of most soft 404 situations — and shows you exactly what needs updating. Fix the link at the source, and the soft 404 resolves itself.

Soft 404s vs Hard 404s: At a Glance