Does a Soft 404 pass on link juice?

[bks_seo]

Hey guys,

Just wondering if a Soft 404 passes on link juice? I know they technically show up as a broken backlink but since it takes them to the homepage, does the link juice get passed on or is it still considered dead and the link juice is lost?

[RyanPurkey]

It could, but it's mostly a broken way to go about doing it. Per Google's guide on it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708, "Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted (also, you probably don’t want your site to rank well for the search query [File not found])."  So it's best to fix them to either return a custom 404 page, redirect via 301, or correctly land on a page of content without the 404.