The Impact of Soft 404s on Websites

Soft 404 errors can confuse regular users, as they click on an interesting link only to find content that isn't what they expected. For search engine crawlers, this means spending a lot of time crawling and indexing non-existent and often repetitive URLs on the website. This can result in a lower rate of site indexing (because the crawler spends a great deal of time on non-existent pages, which may prevent some pages with unique content from being discovered in a timely manner).