Google’s Gary Illyes said on the latest Search Off The Record podcast that soft 404s, pages Google thinks are 404s but return a 200 server status code, do waste crawl budget. However, 404s or 410s do not waste crawl budget, Gary added.

This came up at the 26:10 mark in the video where Gary said, “404/410, they don’t waste crawl budget.” He added, “neither do robotted URLs because we didn’t get back anything, just a status code.”

But when it comes to soft 404s, he said “if you do with, on the other hand, a soft 404, that’s a good job. You’re not putting anything in the index and wasted crawl budget.”

Hat tip to Glenn Gabe for this:

Forum discussion at Twitter.