Soft 404 Errors on site's internal search engine.
I have just moved from a static html5 website to a dynamic Wordpress. I am new to Wordpress and still learning how it works.
Since I have moved, my Google Search Console is showing two soft 404 errors.
?s=%7Bquery%7D
search/%7Bquery%7D/
http://www.example.com/?s=%7Bquery%7D
http://www.example.com/search/%7Bquery%7D/
For privacy reasons I can not give you my url at this time, but I will give you the theme I am using. And the theme itself has similar errors.
(remove the same in front of .com)
http://themenectar .com/demo/salient-frostwave/search/%7Bquery%7D/
http://themenectar .com/demo/salient-frostwave/?s=%7Bquery%7D
I have checked response code and it is 200 OK which is bad. It should return a 404!
How do I change or redirect the soft 404 to normal 404 code?
These are not actually pages that I have control over. These are generated from the website's internal search engine.
I have researched online and there is no tutorial or a guide on how to fix these. There are a lot of articles explaining the difference between 404 and soft 404 but none of them really give proper solution to this. And I have noticed that a lot of people are actually having this issue without solution!
Can someone suggest a fix?
Thank you!