Google’s John Mueller answered a question about an ongoing problem on Google’s side related to soft 404 error response code and how it’s handled. It’s because of a change on Google’s side.
Soft 404
A 404 error response code is a code that is sent by a web page to the web browser or to Google informing them that the page they were looking for no longer exists.
A server response code known as a 200 Response Code is a message confirming that the page that the visitor was looking for exists.
