What is a Soft 404 error?

[warrantyau]

What is a Soft 404 error?

[WoodsPainting]

A soft 404 is a URL that returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist and also a 200-level (success) code. In some cases, it might be a page with little or no content--for example, a sparsely populated or empty page.

[ritesh3592]

These are those 404 Errors when a user looks for a webpage which is not served by server and instead of this the user is re-directed to the home page of that website.

[sophiawils59]

Soft 404 happens when Google determines that a page with status code 200 should display status 404 (error) rather than status 200 (live).

[GeethaN]

Well!!
Google announced they added “soft” or “crypto” 404s to their “crawl errors” report in Google Webmaster Tools. Soft 404s or crypto 404s are page not found pages that return the server response code of 200. Technically, 404 pages should return a server status code 404, which means page not found..

talking about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) :
If a website returns a HTTP status code other than 404 (or 410) for a non-existent page, it can negatively impact the the website’s performance in organic search. Firstly, by failing to serve a 404 status code, your website is telling search engines that there’s a real page at the URL they’re attempting to access. As a result, the URL you’ve deleted (with no content) will be crawled and indexed, thus wasting valuable crawl budget.

[jayam]

A soft 404 is a URL that returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist and also a 200-level (success) code. In some cases, it might be a page with little or no content--for example, a sparsely populated or empty page