The most common bug I find on startup sites: the page got renamed, the old URL got abandoned
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I've been scanning startup marketing sites lately (it's part of how I do outreach for my agency) and one defect keeps showing up: a page gets renamed or a route changes, nobody sets up a 301, and the sitemap keeps pointing at a URL that no longer exists.
It's invisible from inside the company. The site looks fine, every link in the nav works, and meanwhile search engines and old backlinks are quietly hitting 404s.
The fix is usually a one-line redirect. What makes it interesting to me is why it happens: renames feel like refactors, so nobody treats them as breaking changes for the outside world.
If you've ever audited someone else's site, or had yours audited, what turned up that nobody inside had noticed?
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I audited ours last week, mostly because another thread here made me feel guilty about never having run it. Around 290 URLs with Googlebot's user agent, ugly ones first.
What turned up was small and stupid. /favicon.ico at the root returns 404. Every icon we declare sits under /img/favicon/ and all of those are fine, so nothing on the page looks brokeOn renames you are right that it is a refactor problem. In Java I rename a method and the compiler tells me every caller. A URL has callers too and there is no compiler behind it.
What is your fastest way to find the old URLs after a rename, when the sitemap has already forgotten them? 🤔n and nothing in the build fails. It only shows up if you ask for the path browsers ask for by default.