Failure mode: chasing soft 404s

Failure mode: chasing soft 404s
Mistake: your crawler flags a 200 OK as "live" and you skip it. The page actually shows "product not found" with a 200 status. Prospect ignored, opportunity lost.
Fix workflow:
— 1. Pull every 200-status target backlink into a batch.
— 2. Trigger a content-rule pass: regex-match the body for "not found", "no longer available", "page expired", empty H1.
— 3. Cross-check word count under 50 against thin-page list.
— 4. Flag matches as soft-404, route to outreach queue with the dead anchor noted.
— 5. QA gate: human spot-check 5% of flagged before sending.
Automation fits at steps 2-3 (Screaming Frog custom extraction or a Python body-scan).
Definition of done: zero 200-status soft-404s sitting in your "healthy" bucket.