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@patrick_at_nebraska_medicine I confirm that your assumption about the essence of soft 404s is correct. I am experiencing the same with several pages in online travel (eg. destination pages that have zero search results). To fix it, you have to be creative and find a way to display some content on these zero-ratings pages. I am afraid, that just removing the "no ratings are available" wording will not solve the problem.

@isabelledylag I suggest not to fix it, but get rid of this troublesome 'resultsPerPage' parameter completely. Ideally, you should have all category pages served and linked internally without parameters. Also, give your web developer a task to set up default number of items per page, and omit the parameter for the default values.

Another improvement you can make is ask your webmaster to shorten the "page" parameter into "p".

What you have to keep in mind is that all your paginated versions should have proper canonical tag pointing to the first page.