A dangling web page processing system ranks dangling web pages on the web. The system ranks dangling web pages of high quality that cannot be crawled by a crawler. In addition, the system adjusts ranks to penalize dangling web pages that return errors when links on the dangling web pages are crawled. By providing a rank for dangling web pages, the present system allows the concentration of crawling resources on those dangling web pages that have the highest rank in the uncrawled region. The system operates locally to the dangling web pages, providing efficient determination of ranks for the dangling web pages. The system explicitly discriminates against web pages on the basis of whether they point to penalty pages, i.e., pages that return an error when a link is followed. By incorporating more fine-grained information such as this into ranking, the system can improve the quality of individual search results and better manage resources for crawling.