Common Linked Pages mistakes that still ship

Content teams inherit URL messes they did not design. The mistakes that still ship treat the navigation mock as the inventory of the public web. SlaySlop's Linked pages check "Discovers public pages reachable from the scanned surface." If you never look at discovery, you never see the extras crawlers and humans still walk into.

Outcome if you catch these early

Public reachability matches intent. Thin or legacy URLs get redirects or removals. Performance and accessibility audits cover commercially important discovered routes. Editorial does not accidentally re-link a retired campaign.

Boundaries

Read-only discovery. Permissioned scans. Not a pentest. Not a bulk delete tool. Linked pages sits under UX beside failed requests and technology detection. Discovery ≠ ranking ≠ uptime.

Mistake 1: QA only what is in the Figma nav

Footers, blog CTAs, and hard-coded email templates link elsewhere. Discovery surfaces them. Homepage-only QA does not.

# Permissioned: sample anchors from a live page
curl -sL "https://www.example.com/" | tr '"' '\n' | grep -E '^/' | sort -u | head -n 50

Mistake 2: assuming unpublished means unlinked

A "hidden" landing page still publicly reachable from an old article is published for practical purposes. Robots meta and auth are separate controls. Linked pages answers reachability from the scanned surface first.

Mistake 3: soft 404 templates that return 200

Discovery finds the URL. Users get a friendly "not found" inside a 200. Crawlers and answer engines get confused. Pair discovery with content quality and status discipline.

mistake: soft_404
symptom: discovered URL returns 200 with "page missing" copy
fix: real 404/410 or redirect; fix internal links

Mistake 4: ignoring locale and www duplicates

Discovery across aliases inflates the set. Canonical and redirect strategy belong with SEO checks; awareness belongs here. Handoff should not list four clones of the same story as four finished pages.

Mistake 5: never reconciling sitemap vs links

Sitemaps may list URLs nothing links to, or omit URLs everything links to. Both mismatches are editorial problems. Read both inventories.

Mistake 6: treating discovery as a security scan

Finding a link to /login is normal. Finding a link to an exposed backup is a security ticket. Use the right sibling checks—Exposed files and admin panels, client-side secrets—when the destination warrants it. Linked pages only told you the path was reachable.

Mistake 7: skipping re-discovery after CMS migrations

Migrations leave alias tables and menu blocks behind. Re-run discovery after cutover, not only before.

Depth notes

For SEO and AEO clarity: discovery expands which URLs need titles, canonicals, and structured data review. It does not invent those tags. When I clean thin tag archives, I start from pages that are still linked, because those are the ones users keep hitting.

More context

Editorial tip: when writers ask for a "temporary" URL, put an expiry on the calendar and a discovery re-check on that day. Temporary is how /temp-partner-deal becomes a five-year footgun.

Mistake 8: blocking crawlers and forgetting humans

noindex or robots.txt Disallow does not unlink a footer entry. Humans still click. Discovery still matters for UX even when SEO intends exclusion. Fix the link or the auth story—not only the robots line.

Related next step

Use Linked pages to build the real URL list, then run quality audits on what you ship. SlaySlop keeps route-attached findings beside that discovery context.