Word.ws English Dictionary

soft 404

soft 404 noun: a 404 page (the result of trying to follow a broken link within a website) which reports a 200 OK HTTP response code rather than 404 Not Found, falsely indicating to the browser that the page exists and was loaded correctly.

Noun

soft 404 (plural soft 404s)

  1. A 404 page (the result of trying to follow a broken link within a website) which reports a 200 OK HTTP response code rather than 404 Not Found, falsely indicating to the browser that the page exists and was loaded correctly.
    • To ensure that the server would return a soft 404, the random sequence of characters was appended to an absolute URL and file path. […] Given that our research deals with identifying and predicting soft 404s, we chose to use a ratio of 50% normal pages and 50% soft 404s.2012, Luis Meneses, Richard Furuta, Frank Shipman, “Identifying “Soft 404” Error Pages: Analyzing the Lexical Signatures of Documents in Distributed Collections”, in Panayiotis Zaphiris, George...
    • However, redirects also may be “soft 404” messages to hide broken links.2013, Richard Rogers, “National Web Studies”, in Digital Methods, The MIT Press, →ISBN, page 141

Forms of soft 404

pluralsoft 404s

Origin of soft 404

Introduced in 2004 by Ziv Bar-Yossef et al.

Questions about soft 404

What does soft 404 mean?
Soft 404 means a 404 page (the result of trying to follow a broken link within a website) which reports a 200 OK HTTP response code rather than 404 Not Found, falsely indicating to the browser that the page exists and was loaded correctly.
What part of speech is soft 404?
Soft 404 is a noun.
What is the plural of soft 404?
The plural of soft 404 is soft 404s.

Words near soft 404 in the dictionary

  1. sofritto
  2. sofrittos
  3. Sofronio Española
  4. SOFs
  5. soft
  6. soft 404
  7. soft 404s
  8. soft a
  9. soft a's
  10. soft as a baby's bottom
  11. soft as silk

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: soft 404 (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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