Soft 404s on member pages

Any idea why valid member pages would show up as a soft 404 in GWT?

Here is the format of member pages: http://www.xyz.com/forum/members/username.html

Thanks.

Do those members actually exist?

soft 404's are basically dead pages that return a 200 header.

so, so you didn't have a member named 'bob', the /bob.html member page would return a soft 404.

Yes, the members exist!

I would just ignore it then. It will likely clear out on its own in due time.

i believe this is due to the fact that you need to be logged in to view member pages. since bots can't log in, they get a soft 404. i've added /members to the robots.txt file.