<b>Soft-404s account for 41% of 'crawled, not indexed'</b>

<b>Soft-404s account for 41% of 'crawled, not indexed'</b>
We categorized the GSC 'Crawled - currently not indexed' bucket across 89 sites (118k URLs).

— Soft-404 (200 status, empty/error content): 41.0% ▓▓▓▓░░░░░░
— Thin/duplicate: 33.5% ▓▓▓░░░░░░░
— Genuinely low-value: 18.0% ▓▓░░░░░░░░
— Crawl-budget deferred: 7.5% ░░░░░░░░░░

The soft-404 share surprised us. These are URLs returning HTTP 200 with 'no results,' 'out of stock,' or empty-state templates — Google fetches, finds nothing, and quietly drops them.

Most common source: filtered listing pages and expired-product templates that 200 instead of 404/410.

So what: before blaming content quality on 'crawled not indexed,' check status integrity. 4 in 10 are technical — a 200 lying about an empty page.