: Do soft 404 errors on wiki sites caused by pages not yet created cause SEO problems? I host a couple of wiki based sites, so there is a lot of content at various stages of generation, and

@Berumen354

Soft HTTP 404s errors in search console are pages returning HTTP 200 Ok response codes in pages that Google consider with low value to the user. In this Google help forum about soft 404s they states the following:


Returning a success code, rather than 404/410 (not found) or 301
(moved), is a bad practice.


So to answer your question in short: Yes, soft 404 errors do cause SEO problems.

It is also evident that Google treats 404 and soft 404 http errors the same way and that Google will deindex those pages if they aren’t fixed quickly.

My Recommendation

A quick solution would be, you can create a example.com/useful-template with 90% of the content that will be reused, just change 50% title Like "Content for Water Supply coming up" and the last paragraph. Then with this template apply it to all the other pages in "development" and make sure that you add a canonical tag pointing to /useful-template like:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/useful-template">


Happy wiking ;)

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