The Soft 404 That Hid My Multi-Tenant SaaS From Google
Originally published on meridianbuild.dev , my engineering blog where I write up the real bugs and decisions behind the products I build. Google Search Console has a category that sounds harmless and is not: "Soft 404." It means Google fetched a page, got an HTTP 200, and then decided the content looks like an error anyway. So it quietly refuses to index it. I opened GSC one morning for Eglise en…
Google Search Console has a category called Soft 404, which can hide your multi-tenant SaaS from search engine indexing. This occurs when Google fetches a page and gets an HTTP 200 response, but then determines the content appears to be an error page. To resolve this issue for Eglise en Ligne, a SaaS platform for churches with multiple domains, the author implemented a fix in their Next.js App Router project.
The solution involves returning a proper 404 status code instead of a 200 with an error message when a tenant subpage is accessed on a marketing domain. This was achieved by adding a guard in the [locale] layout file, which checks for the presence of a church context and returns a real 404 if none is found. The fix effectively eliminated Soft 404 errors across all three domains, allowing Google to properly index the site's content and improving crawl budget allocation.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
