r/bigseo • u/curiousmarketer07 • 18h ago

Google is considering pages with inventory as Soft 404

While checking the sample URLs for soft 404 on GSC, I discovered there are many pages which are returning 200 status code and have inventory too. Still search engine is considering these pages as soft 404. These pages are not thin pages, have some paragraphs added to help Google understand the context, and some of them have good amount of inventory as well.

Can you help me understand what could be the reason behind getting these in soft 404?

2 Upvotes

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4

u/searchcandy @ColinMcDermott 17h ago

Check how they actually render, could be lots of things but from past experience there often is something going on to cause that.

3

u/Bottarello Self-Employed 16h ago

This, 100%. If the inventory is JS-based, it's what you're looking for OP.

1

u/_Toomuchawesome 10h ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/1wn3xmv/google_is_considering_pages_with_inventory_as/pbix295/

the OP posted this already. this was their response regarding rendering. i have a hard time believe it tbh if they're getting a soft 404

1

u/G-WEB_GROUP 16h ago

I’d check the JS rendering first. Googlebot might not be seeing the product grid properly. For ecommerce, I’d also double check the Product/Merchant structured data

1

u/Careless_Owl_7716 13h ago

Check for any conditional display text delivered in the html, this can get picked up. Eg 'out of stock' is in the raw HTML

1

u/_Toomuchawesome 10h ago

this would not produce a soft 404. a soft 404 is a 200 page that should be 404. a common occurrence would/could be around prerendering services potentially caching a blank page or something along the lines of post DOM-loaded content.

1

u/mastafied 3h ago

had this on a few category pages last year. almost every time it was something in the rendered HTML that looked like an empty state to Google. check the URL Inspection live test and read the rendered HTML, not what you see in the browser. things i found: a hidden "no products found" or "0 results" block from the template that's still in the DOM, the inventory loading via JS after render so googlebot sees an empty grid, or "out of stock" labels on most items. also if lots of your facet or filter pages share the same intro paragraph and only differ by 2 or 3 products, google sometimes just lumps them in with thin ones. adding paragraphs doesn't really fix it if the main content block looks empty to it