Meaning of soft 404 | Babel Free

Definitions

A 404 page (the result of trying to follow a broken link within a website) which reports a 200 OK HTTP response code rather than 404 Not Found, falsely indicating to the browser that the page exists and was loaded correctly.

Examples

“To ensure that the server would return a soft 404, the random sequence of characters was appended to an absolute URL and file path. […] Given that our research deals with identifying and predicting soft 404s, we chose to use a ratio of 50% normal pages and 50% soft 404s.”

“However, redirects also may be “soft 404” messages to hide broken links.”

“These so-called soft 404 error pages can degrade the performance of a web crawler since they are usually not worth downloading and indexing.”

“The data crawling also has specific problems that must be observed such as time between requests, soft-404 error, identification of URL patterns of the pages, and extraction of data from the source code.”

CEFR level