If you’re using GSC to locate 404 error pages, you might also notice a report on something called a “soft 404”. Soft 404s are pages that tell a user that a page does not exist, but still return a valid 200 response code. A soft 404 is an indication that Google has found no content of value on that page, or is otherwise struggling to make sense of why the page exists.
Soft 404s are different from standard 404s in that they’re not truly returning a broken page response code. However, the label of a soft 404 can be enough for Google to drop a page from its index.
Google often sees empty pages as soft 404s. If you’re using Lumar, try setting up a custom extraction for pages with a word count below a certain threshold. If you see URLs of any value appearing here or in GSC’s soft 404 report, it’s worth taking the time to review these separately and make any relevant on-page improvements.