1. Start with the pages visitors need
List your homepage, services, contact page and important campaign landing pages. Open the links in your navigation and footer. Check links from recent emails or adverts too: a crawler may never discover an unlinked campaign URL.
A page can show an error message while returning a successful HTTP response. This is often called a soft 404. Read what the page says as well as looking at its status; a simple response check does not catch every misleading error page.
2. Use a crawler for broader coverage
A crawler follows links and reads sitemaps to build a list of pages. Look for a report of the exact URLs checked, not just a green score. Check whether robots rules, login requirements, JavaScript or page limits prevented coverage.
Website Oversight discovers up to 100 public pages per website. Its dashboard distinguishes checked, waiting and excluded pages. It inspects initial HTML, so content generated only by JavaScript needs a browser-based check.
3. Interpret the response before making changes
- 404 — not found
- The requested address was not found. Check for a typo, deleted page or changed address.
- 410 — gone
- The page is deliberately no longer available. Confirm whether incoming links should be updated.
- 403 — forbidden
- Access was refused. A firewall may block the monitoring service even when visitors can open the page.
- 429 — too many requests
- The site is limiting requests. Review rate limits rather than assuming the page has disappeared.
- 500 or 503 — server error
- The server could not complete the request or was unavailable. Check your hosting and application logs.
4. Choose a relevant repair
Restore a page that should exist. Correct an incorrect internal link. If content has moved, redirect the old address to its relevant replacement. Avoid sending every missing address to the homepage: visitors may still be unable to find what they wanted. Some removed pages should remain unavailable.
5. Verify and keep a record
Open the original address after the repair, follow any redirect and check the destination content. Test the actual user task separately, especially contact forms and purchases. Keep the old result and a new check so you can distinguish recovery from an error that is still present.
Website Oversight checks homepages hourly and discovered pages daily, with retries before confirmed error alerts. It gives you a record to investigate; it does not repair pages or test transactions. See the seven-day trial.
Further reading
Google explains HTTP status codes and search crawling, including why not every unavailable URL represents a problem.