Soft-404 hygiene

Why it matters

Agents and crawlers rely on a real 404 or 410 status to know a resource is missing. A 200 with the app shell (soft 404) makes them believe every probed path exists, pollutes indexes, and hides broken links from monitoring.

How to fix it

Answer unknown paths with HTTP 404 or 410, not with HTTP 200 or a redirect.

1. Request a random path that does not exist and record the status.

2. Configure the server or the single-page app router to return 404 for unknown routes.

   location / {
     try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
   }

3. Do not redirect unknown paths to the home page.

Verify

Run a new scan for this checkpoint: