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Soft 404 error

content.soft_404
Priority
High
Severity
Warning

What we look for

These short pages load as if they were fine, but their title or text says something like 'page not found' or 'no longer available', which makes them soft 404s (error pages that report success).

Why it matters

Visitors who land on one find nothing there. Search engines usually work out that the page is an error and drop it, but only after spending visits on it.

How to fix

Make each missing page return a real 404 or 410 status code (the server's reply that a page is gone) from the server or CMS, or send its address to the closest live page with a 301 redirect (a permanent forwarding rule). If the page is real, rewrite the text that reads like an error.

What it cannot know

Raptor looks for a few English phrases on short pages, so it can miss error pages worded otherwise and flag a real page that uses those phrases.

Seen in a real crawl

From a crawl of Fernhollow Outdoor, a test site built for this site’s demo.

High

1 page shows an error message but reports success

  • /waterproofs/ridge-trousers/Page appears to be a soft 404
Paths on http://127.0.0.1:8006raptor 0.3.0, 17 Oct 2026

Open this finding in that crawl’s report

It also fired on Millbrook Hardware.

Where you’ll see it

The id is stable, and every surface uses it, so it’s the thing to search for or hand to an agent.

Terminal
When it is one of the five findings under Fix first, raptor crawl prints the id under it.
Check: content.soft_404
crawl.json and the CSV
The crawl JSON names the finding by this id, and so do the CSV and raptor_query.
"check_id": "content.soft_404"
The HTML report
This link opens the finding in the report, and each finding shows its id.
crawl.html#finding=content.soft_404
MCP
raptor_findings with this check_id returns the finding in full, with a fix brief ready to paste into a task. If it didn’t fire, it says why.
raptor_findings {
  "job_id": "...",
  "check_id": "content.soft_404"
}