What is the best way to hide pages with empty content, and how do they affect SEO?

Practice



Sometimes on the pages of an online store or catalogue there are cases where there are no results in a given category or for the given criteria, but there are links leading to this page, and this page has been added to the sitemap.

at the same time, Yandex returns

This page has been excluded from search as a result of a special algorithm. If in the future the algorithm judges the page to be sufficiently relevant to users' queries, it will appear in search automatically.

The page clearly has fewer than 500 characters, or there isn't a single unique character on it at all- apart from the phrase - nothing found matching the given criteria.

There can be several ways to solve this

1) in the server response header return 404 but with a normal page and the phrase no objects found, products. hotels, services, companies, etc.

2) add noindex to meta to forbid indexing of such pages

3) add canonical in meta pointing to a page that definitely has some objects on it

4) lower the page's priority in the sitemap

5) completely hide such pages and show nothing except the standard 404 page with a 404 header

Let's look at all the pros and cons of each of the above options in more detail

Thus, the most optimal solution will be

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