VercatusSoft 404
A page that answers 2xx but whose content suggests an error — an empty page or a "not found" message — is reported by Search Console as a soft 404, a reason the page is not indexed; Google recommends returning 404 for truly missing pages or adding information that shows the page is not an error. URLs returning 4xx are removed from the index, soft 404s keep being crawled and waste crawl budget, and Google's faceted-navigation guide says to return 404 for filter combinations with no results.
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AGrade A: official documentation or a standard. A grade describes the provenance of the sources above; it is not a probability that a change will work. The effect basis says how the size of the effect is known: measured by a study, taken from an industry report, only documented without a size, or not quantified.
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