Your soft 404s are eating crawl you blame on "budget"

Your soft 404s are eating crawl you blame on "budget"

The pattern: empty search results, out-of-stock products, and dead category pages all return HTTP 200 with a "nothing here" body. Google crawls them, finds them worthless, and keeps coming back to re-check — because a 200 says "this is a real page."

That's not Google wasting your budget. That's you telling it these pages exist and matter.

The fix: return a real 404 or 410 for genuinely empty pages. A 410 (Gone) tells Google to drop it faster than a 404. Stop serving 200 for nothing.

Google's docs list soft 404s as a crawl-efficiency problem they actively flag in Search Console.

The status code is a promise. Stop making promises you can't keep.