<b>The Soft-404 Triage Framework</b>

<b>The Soft-404 Triage Framework</b>
Pages returning 200 but serving "not found" content waste your best prospects. Catch them.
1 — Crawl competitor outbound links, flag every 200 response.
2 — Re-fetch flagged URLs; compare word count vs. a known-good page on the same domain.
3 — Trigger: body under 50 words OR contains "page not found" / "no longer exists" string.
4 — QA gate: manually open 5% of flagged set to confirm pattern before scaling.
5 — Promote confirmed soft-404s into your replacement-content queue.
Automation fits at step 2 — a headless fetch + string match runs the whole batch unattended.
<i>Definition of done:</i> every 200-status link is classified as live, soft-404, or uncertain, with the uncertain bucket under 10%.