If a Page on Your Website Breaks, We Find Out Before You Do
Every request for an address that does not exist is now recorded: what was asked for, where the visitor came from, and how often it happens. Patterns raise an alert.
Why this came out of the routing work
The fault described in every page URL now works ran for a long time without being reported, and the reason is instructive. We had no record of failed requests. Every visit that went wrong left no trace at all, so from our side the platform looked perfectly healthy.
The lesson is that you cannot fix what you do not measure, and a system with no record of its failures will always look like it is working.
What gets recorded
- The address requested.
- The page it was linked from, where the browser tells us.
- How many times, and over what period.
- Whether it is a real visitor or an automated scanner, which is most of the volume and is filtered out.
What the patterns reveal
A single address failing repeatedly from one source is usually a real broken link somewhere in the world: an old casting profile, a printed card, another site pointing at a page that has been renamed.
Many addresses failing across many accounts is a platform fault, which is exactly the shape the routing bug had and exactly the thing we could not previously see.
One account, many failures usually means somebody renamed a page and did not know that the old address would stop working.
What you get from it
If a page on your site is being asked for and not found, you are told, along with where the requests are coming from. Usually the fix is simple: restore the page, or point the old address at the new one.
Alerts are off by default and can be switched on in notification preferences. For most people this is a once-a-year event and does not warrant an email subscription.
Why this matters for search
Broken addresses that search engines have already indexed count against a site, and they waste the limited attention a crawler gives you. Fixing them is unglamorous and it works, in the same category as having a real favicon and declaring a canonical address: nobody praises you for it and its absence is noticed. More on the general picture in making your site easy to find.
Create your free actor website and we will watch it for you.
