2026-10-16 · Architecture
A marketplace answered every address with 200
An SEO audit without Search Console access: only what a search engine sees from outside, and the code. The biggest error was a single line.
I went through an online marketplace with offers in hundreds of cities the way a search engine does: status codes, headers, sitemap, structured data per page type, a sample of 40 random city pages.
What I found
Every made-up address answered 200 — a “soft 404”. The SSR server set 404 and the next line overwrote it with 200. A one-liner, unnoticed because everything looked normal in the browser.
The sitemap listed 18,417 “city × topic” pages, including ones without a single visible offer, and small towns were filled with the same nationwide offers. English and Russian subdomains served German text with their own canonical address. And one icon was embedded in the HTML 108 times as Base64 — 173 KB of 828.
Cutting carefully
Two AI models made a plan independently, and I weighed the differences. I rejected switching the markup to “Product” for stars in search results: risk of manual actions. And without Search Console data I did not remove 90 percent of the pages but chose the mildest threshold — a reversible step instead of a big one.
A single rule, “does the page have content”, now decides both the sitemap and noindex on the page itself. For the hourly sitemap one SQL query computes it for all cities in 0.1 seconds; checked against the per-page rule on 400 pages: zero differences.
Result after 14 commits: honest 404s, a redirect from the bare domain, 5,385 instead of 18,417 city pages per language in the sitemap, own descriptions, canonical of untranslated pages pointing to the original language, home page about 173 KB lighter. And one tip for every SSR project: requesting a made-up address with curl takes one second.