Q: Search Console says my migrated pages are 'soft 404s' — but they redirect fine. What's going on?

Q: Search Console says my migrated pages are 'soft 404s' — but they redirect fine. What's going on?

Confusing label, and it's pointing at a real issue worth understanding.

Short answer: your old URLs are probably redirecting to a page that doesn't truly match — often the homepage or a generic category — so Google calls it a soft 404.

Long answer: a soft 404 means the destination behaves like a not-found even though it returns 200. The classic cause in migrations is the lazy catch-all: when there's no good match, the rule dumps everything to the homepage. Google sees a product URL landing on an unrelated home page and flags it as effectively missing. Redirecting to an irrelevant page is treated almost like no redirect at all for signal transfer.

Next step: find which old URLs are mapped to the homepage or a mismatched page. Re-point each to its true equivalent. If no equivalent exists, send it to the closest relevant category — and only return a real 404/410 when the content is genuinely gone.