Aviary SEO Recovery — Sitemap & Canonical Fixes

Overview

During a February 2026 internal review, Mark identified deep-seated technical SEO issues on the Aviary site that had been preventing Google from crawling beyond the homepage. The root cause was a missing sitemap, which masked a broader set of canonical errors, broken internal links, and orphaned pages. Recovery work is in progress.

Root Cause

Missing sitemap. When a search bot visits a site with no sitemap, it crawls the homepage and stops. This meant:

Google had only indexed the homepage
Underlying errors (broken links, canonical conflicts, orphan pages) were hidden from audits
The site appeared healthier than it was — until the sitemap was added and full crawling began

"When a bot goes to the site to crawl it, the first thing it does is looks at the sitemap. And if there's no sitemap, it just crawls the homepage and that's it." — Mark Hope

Compounding Issues Discovered

Once the sitemap was in place and Google began crawling the full site, a backlog of errors surfaced:

Canonical conflicts — old pages left in place after new pages were created, with no canonical tags to resolve the duplication
Broken internal links — links pointing to old/removed pages
Orphan pages — pages with no internal links pointing to them (8 remaining as of this meeting)
Multiple site tags — duplicate or conflicting tag manager / analytics tags
Low site health score — audits were returning ~1,300 errors at peak

Fixes Applied (Mark Hope)

Fix	Status
Added XML sitemap	✅ Complete
Fixed canonical errors	✅ Complete
Set up instant indexing	✅ Complete
Resolved ~1,300 audit errors	✅ Complete
Fix 8 orphan pages	🔄 In progress
Resolve multiple site tags	🔄 In progress

Current Status

Site health score is up significantly from baseline. Google is now crawling the full site. Instant indexing has been configured to accelerate re-indexing, though Google is slow to re-prioritize a site that had no sitemap for an extended period.

Mark expects to close out the remaining orphan pages and tag issues within the same work session.

Open Action Items

[ ] Fix 8 orphan pages (@Mark Hope)
[ ] Resolve multiple site tags (@Mark Hope)
[ ] Email client re: Aviary health improvements and recovery progress (@Mark Hope)

^[1]
^[2]