<b>Q: Search Console says 'Soft 404' on pages that load fine. What does that even mean?</b>

<b>Q: Search Console says 'Soft 404' on pages that load fine. What does that even mean?</b>

Short answer: Google thinks the page is empty or irrelevant even though it returns a '200 OK.'

Long answer: A hard 404 returns a 'not found' status. A SOFT 404 is when a page loads normally (status 200) but Google decides it has no real content — so it treats it as missing anyway. After a migration, two things commonly trigger this:

— Old URLs redirected to a generic page (homepage, a near-empty category) — Google sees the mismatch and flags it.
— New pages that came over thin or broken, missing the content the old URL had.

It matters because soft-404'd pages get dropped from the index, taking their rankings with them.

Next step: open the flagged URLs. If it's a redirect to an irrelevant page, repoint the 301 to a real matching page. If it's a thin new page, restore the content the old version had. Then use 'Validate Fix' in Search Console to trigger a recrawl.