<b>Soft 404 Detection Protocol</b>

<b>Soft 404 Detection Protocol</b>
Many 'live' competitor pages return 200 but show a 'page not found' body. Crawlers miss these. You won't.

1. Crawl competitor backlink targets and capture status code + response body.
2. Flag any 200 page whose body contains: 'not found', 'no longer available', 'page removed', or a near-empty word count (under 50).
3. Verify manually — false positives happen on thin pages.
4. Confirmed soft 404s join the outreach queue alongside hard 404s.
5. Automation fits at step 2: a content-string match rule in your crawler's custom extraction.

Definition of done: soft 404s are flagged by body-content rules, manually verified, and merged into the prospect list.