Your fake-200 error pages are eating crawl you'll never get back
The quiet killer: pages that return 200 OK while displaying "no results" or "product unavailable." Google calls these soft 404s, and they're worse for crawl than honest 404s.
A real 404 tells Google to stop coming. A soft 404 says "valid page, crawl me forever" — so it keeps re-fetching dead inventory, empty search results, and expired listings indefinitely. On a marketplace with rotating stock, that's thousands of zombie URLs draining real crawl.
The fix is returning the truth: 404 or 410 for gone content, not a styled 200 with an apology. 410 is the strongest "this is permanently dead" signal you can send.
Stop returning 200 for nothing.
Honest status codes are crawl hygiene.
Budget Myths
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Your fake-200 error pages are eating crawl you'll never get back
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