Empty search results labeled as Soft 404s?

[MarloSchneider]

I have a site with faceted search but sometimes when someone drills down too far it ends up with no results. The page and outlined and faceted navigation are still there.

The site uses dynamic URLs for the faceted navigation but Google is reporting these no results pages as Soft 404s. How should we handle these?

Should we redirect these?

Can we return 404 in the status code but still show the no results page they are looking for?

Thanks for your responses

[Everett]

First I suggest reading this post:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/information-architecture-faceted-navigation-duplicate-content-oh-my

You may want to consider limiting the depth of your indexable facets. If these are strictly search pages, and you have an alternate form of navigation, you may consider not allowing any of them to be indexed, as Mike recommended. I couldn't say for sure without knowing more about your particular site and situation.

Your bottom line question seems to be "How should we handle these" and in my opinion I think you should focus more on the user than Google. It sounds like a pretty annoying user experience to spend time drilling down five facets deep only to reach a page that has no results. Why even allow them to drill down to that last page? Why not grey out the option? And if they do drill down that far, try showing them some alternatives.

If you want to dynamically serve a 404 status code in the http header for such pages that would be fine too, but it could cause problems if you sometimes have products on those pages and sometimes don't since that URL would be constantly coming in and out of the index. A better solution would be to make the page more useful and/or limit the depth of indexation.

Also, as Mike alludes to below, if you have another source of navigation on the site the "search result" pages probably shouldn't be indexable at all. It depends on your situation so I'm not going to say for sure that you shouldn't index them.

[MikeRoberts]

Does the resulting page shown notify users that there is no relevant information to return and suggest alternates to search for or a way to contact user support/customer service? If so then I wouldn't worry about a Soft 404. Considering these internal search pages should also be "NoIndex, Follow" then the odds of them showing up in serps and/or causing you real problems is low.