TEC-008 · Technical Eligibility

Treat not-found pages intentionally

• Structural
• IF
• AND
• THEN
• ELSE

The decision

• IF
  • a resource no longer exists and has no valid replacement
• THEN
  • return a real not-found state with helpful navigation
• ELSE
  • redirect only when a genuine equivalent exists

Primary metric

soft-404 rate

Guardrail

lost valuable links

Reason

Makes the decision explicit, measurable, and reversible where possible.

LAKA levels

• Structural

Operators

• IF
• AND
• THEN
• ELSE

Governs gates

• technical feasibility

Source

04-IF-ELSE-AND-OR-RULEBOOK.md — TEC-008 — Treat not-found pages intentionally

The other eleven rules in Technical Eligibility

• TEC-001 Require public accessibility IF a page is intended for search visibility Baseline
• TEC-002 Use correct response states IF a canonical page is healthy and available Structural
• TEC-003 Validate rendered main content IF essential content or links depend on JavaScript Structural
• TEC-004 Separate crawling from indexing controls IF the goal is to keep a page out of search results Structural
• TEC-005 Maintain canonical coherence IF multiple URLs represent substantially the same content Structural
• TEC-006 Keep sitemaps canonical and current IF a URL is important, canonical, and intended for indexing Structural
• TEC-007 Redirect to the closest valid successor IF a URL permanently moves or is consolidated Structural
• TEC-009 Control faceted and parameter volume IF filters, sorting, search, tracking, or session parameters create many near-duplicate URLs Structural
• TEC-010 Preserve content parity IF mobile, desktop, locale, or rendered versions differ Structural
• TEC-011 Prioritize real-user performance IF field performance or business outcomes show latency, instability, or interaction problems Minor
• TEC-012 Scale crawl work to site size and change rate IF the site is very large, rapidly changing, or shows crawl/index waste Structural