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.
Missing sitemap. When a search bot visits a site with no sitemap, it crawls the homepage and stops. This meant:
"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
Once the sitemap was in place and Google began crawling the full site, a backlog of errors surfaced:
| 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 |
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.