This note preserves the original context of the Facebook post. Some tools, interfaces, and external links may have changed.
E-commerce websites sometimes produce blank category pages with no products or content.
The original discussion compared noindex vs. soft 404, and the point was not to find a single answer that would apply to all sites, but to think about how search engines would know that a page has changed in a way that warrants re-examination when it has content in the future.
Possible change signals include page content becoming richer, new internal links appearing, product status changing, or sitemap being updated simultaneously with other website signals.
Ideally, a website should avoid producing blank pages that serve no purpose.
If the business process does need to preserve such a URL, it should clearly define its state when there is no content and when the content is restored, and recheck the indexing policy after the state changes.
What is saved here is the discussion thread in 2021. Before implementation, it still needs to be judged based on the current search engine files and website data.
Links mentioned in the original post
Related reading
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