Missing pages answer 200

Updated 28 October 2026.

Some sites answer every address with a page. Ask for one that never existed and they serve the home page, or a friendly “not found” page, with 200 OK. Then every page the site ever removes, and every link anyone writes wrong, answers as if it were there. This check asks the site, once, for an address that cannot exist, and reads the answer.

GET /trakis-check-missing-page
HTTP/2 302  Location: /
HTTP/2 200  <title>Home — Example Shop</title>

What Google says:

• Return a 404 for pages that are truly not found; a page that says “not found” without a 404 is listed as a soft 404 (Page indexing report).
• A 404 is not necessarily a problem when the page was removed with nothing to replace it (Page indexing report). Google does not use the content of a 4xx answer, and 4xx answers other than 429 do not change how fast it crawls the site (HTTP status codes).
• Soft 404 pages keep being crawled and waste the crawl (crawl budget).
• A redirect is for a page you removed when you want to send people to a new one (redirects): the replacement, not every missing address.

Where it comes from, and the fix:

• A catch-all redirect to the home page. Often a plugin or a server rule added to “keep the visitor”. Remove it, and keep redirects for pages that moved, each to its replacement.
• A framework route that renders a page for any path. Make it answer 404 when it has nothing to show.
• A custom error page set up to answer 200. Keep the page, change its status to 404.

Ours, as it is. Asked for /trakis-check-missing-page on 28 October 2026, trakis.io answered 404, and so did the demo shop, which serves its own not-found page with the right status. The demo’s soft 404 is a single page instead, a boot taken off sale: INDEX-007.

Check it yourself. Ask your site for an address that cannot exist, such as /this-page-does-not-exist, with curl -sL -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" and the address: anything but 404 or 410 is this case.

How the audit decides.

• Once per audit, on a real domain, the crawler asks for /trakis-check-missing-page, an address no site has. It does not ask where robots.txt forbids it; the crawler page says it makes this request.
• A 200, on that address or after the site’s own redirect, is the finding: one for the site, because the fix is one setting. The evidence is where it landed and the title of what answered.
• Any other answer, a 404, a 410, a 403 from a firewall, says nothing here.

Sources, read on 28 October 2026: Google Search Console Help, Page indexing report · Google, How HTTP status codes affect Google's crawlers · Google, Crawl budget management for large sites · Google Search Central, Redirects and Google Search.

A catch-all rule that redirects every unknown address to the home page, a framework route that renders a page for any path, or a custom error page set up to answer 200.

In the Page indexing report, these statuses can come from what this check finds:

• “Soft 404”. When an address that cannot exist answers 200, so do the site's removed pages and mistyped links, and Google lists them as soft 404s. The fix is one setting for the whole site. What this status means, and how to fix it.

• Make the server answer 404 for addresses it has no page for. Keep a helpful not-found page for people; only the status code changes.
• Remove any rule that redirects every unknown address to the home page. Keep redirects for pages that moved, each to its replacement.
• In a single-page app, redirect to an address that answers 404, or add a noindex robots meta tag to the error view.

Ask for an address that cannot exist on your site, such as /this-page-does-not-exist, and look at the status code: anything but 404 or 410 is the case.

Warning An address that cannot exist on the site, /trakis-check-missing-page, answers 200, after a redirect to /, instead of 404.

The server sends every unknown address to the home page; it should answer 404 for them, and keep redirects for pages that moved. (An example shop; the numbers are illustrative.)

INDEX-008 is a warning in the indexation category, and weighs moderately in that category’s score. It is a fact about the site as a whole, so it is reported once, not once per page.

If the finding is deliberate on your site, it can be accepted as intentional in the report. It then leaves the list and the score, and comes back on its own if what it shows changes.

• meta robots noindex · INDEX-001
• X-Robots-Tag noindex header · INDEX-002
• Canonical missing · INDEX-003
• Canonical to another page · INDEX-004
• Relative canonical · INDEX-005
• The domain is a mirror of another domain · INDEX-006
• A page that answers 200 but reads as an error · INDEX-007

A free Trakis audit runs this check and the other 66 on your site, and tells you on how many pages each one sits. Or go back to all the rules.