What is the difference between soft 404 errors and 404 error?

[SkillPTP]

What is the difference between soft 404 errors and 404 error?

[24x7servermanag]

If you will try to access any page and will get message as 404 as error not found that means the page does not exist. It has been deleted and can not be load now.

Soft 404 error page means when you will try to access any particular website's page/link and you will be redirected to other page instead of 404 error message page.

Hope this will clarify the difference.

[Naksh]

A ‘Soft 404’ error occurs when a non-existent page (a page that has been deleted/removed) displays a ‘page not found’ message to anyone trying to access it, but fails to return a HTTP 404 status code.

[dennis123]

A 404 error is returned when the browser requests a resource from the web server and the server is unable to find that resource so it returns 404 file not found error. On the other hand, soft 404 error is returned when the browser requests a resource from the web server and the server returns 200 OK response for a file that does not exist on the server. Hence, in both the cases, file is not present on the server but in case of soft 404 the server returns 200 OK response code by mistake. We can find out these errors with the help of Google Webmasters Tool and we can either remove them by adding proper redirects and by creating a custom 404 page for helping the user in proper navigation while browsing the site.

[RH-Calvin]

Usually, when someone requests a page that doesn't exist, a server will return a 404 (not found) error. This HTTP response code clearly tells both browsers and search engines that the page doesn't exist. As a result, the content of the page (if any) won't be crawled or indexed by search engines.