Why it matters on an HVAC site
The generator is the service-area template again. A template that produces a page for every town in a county will produce pages for towns the company has never worked in, and those pages render with a heading, a phone number and no content. They return 200 because a file exists.
The second generator is the empty blog category and the empty review feed, both of which render a working page containing nothing.
How to check it yourself
- Search Console Pages report has a "Soft 404" reason with the affected URLs listed.
- Crawl and flag any 200 response under a word-count threshold, then read a sample rather than trusting the threshold.
- Check what the page does when its data source is empty, which is the state that produced the problem.
Worked through in numbers
Search Console reports 187 soft 404s on a contractor site. All are service-area pages.
Each renders the heading "AC Repair in [town]", a phone number, and a footer. The body content is generated from a jobs table, and for these 187 towns the table has no rows.
The fix was not technical. Ninety-four of the towns were places the company genuinely served and now have real content; the other ninety-three were removed and return 410, because the company does not work there and a page claiming otherwise was the actual problem.
Where this sits in the rankings
Scored under Technical SEO. A page that says nothing is here while telling the browser everything is fine.