How to fix it
If the page should exist, restore it. If it is intentionally gone, remove it from the sitemap and from internal links, and consider redirecting it to the closest live page.
When it is not a problem
A 404 is the correct answer for a page that is genuinely gone. Redirecting everything to the homepage is worse than the 404 it replaces, because it hides the loss from everyone including you.
How Rankelle handles it
- SeverityWarning. It costs traffic or clarity without stopping anything, which is where most real work lives.
- DetectionDetected on a single page while crawling it, then grouped with the other pages under the same URL pattern.
- GroupingEvery page with this finding under the same URL pattern becomes one cause, with a confidence taken from how much of the pattern is affected. 400 of 400 is a template; 6 of 14 is phrased as a question.
- LandingThe affected URLs stay under cheap watch. When this finding is gone from all of them, the fix is marked landed without anyone reporting the deploy.
- VerdictAt landing, comparable untouched URLs are frozen as a control set. Twenty-eight days later the two are compared, and the fix can come back as having done nothing.
Try it on your own site, free
No card, and the free tier does not expire — the first verdict takes about six weeks to arrive.