iHome Platform Dev Log · Oct 17

Search Console delivered a scary bill that day: 293 URLs on iobot.top and 35 on soft.iobot.top, all confirmed real 404s from the outside. The sitemap had been 'lying to crawlers': iobot's page region follows the visitor, and crawlers are always international — yet the map assembled post links from the China database, where those posts don't exist internationally, so every one 404'd for Googlebot. Posts now come from the international side only and emit as /en/, structural pages keep both locales, and the home hreflang no longer points at the redirecting Chinese address. The static software sites fixed a different old habit: the map listed bare paths that the static export never served — now everything carries a locale prefix and only lists URLs a crawler can actually reach. The 404 list from this incident also became a regression test — if the map ever wants to lie again, the test blocks it first.