Startup Found Canonical URL Pointing to Unowned Domain, Silently Hurting SEO
A startup discovered that all blog pages on their site declared a canonical URL pointing to a domain they never owned or served content from, likely due to a placeholder config value that was never updated. This misconfiguration could cause search engine crawlers to credit an empty, non-existent domain as the authoritative source of the content, potentially preventing proper indexing. A second bug was also found: the footer's Privacy link directed users to a 404 page because an internal URL rename was not propagated site-wide. Neither issue was visible in normal browser use, as both bugs were hidden in metadata and href attributes. The team fixed both problems after a manual, link-by-link review of the site, highlighting that basic checks like viewing page source and clicking every link can catch critical pre-launch errors no tool flagged.
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