testing-seo

Testing SEO Changes — signomy.xyz

Architecture

• Frontend: Vercel (signomy.xyz DNS) — serves static HTML from frontend/ with cleanUrls: true
• Backend: Railway — only handles /api/*, /mcp, /health, /ws/*, /docs/* via Vercel rewrites
• Velvet Rope middleware runs on Railway only — does NOT affect Googlebot crawling pages on Vercel

Vercel Preview Limitation

Vercel preview deployments may have deployment protection (SSO) enabled, returning 401. If this happens:

• Test source files directly via grep/inspection
• Curl production to establish a baseline (confirm the problem exists today)
• After merge, spot-check production via curl -s https://signomy.xyz/<page> | grep 'name="description"'

Key Test Commands

Check meta descriptions exist

for f in frontend/*.html; do
  name=$(basename "$f" .html)
  desc=$(grep -oP 'name="description" content="\K[^"]+' "$f" | head -1)
  echo "$name: ${desc:-MISSING}"
done

Check canonicals

for f in frontend/*.html; do
  name=$(basename "$f" .html)
  canonical=$(grep -oP 'rel="canonical" href="\K[^"]+' "$f" | head -1)
  echo "$name: ${canonical:-NO CANONICAL}"
done

Verify redirects on production

curl -sI -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} %{redirect_url}" "https://signomy.xyz/<path>"

Check robots.txt

curl -s https://signomy.xyz/robots.txt | grep -i sitemap

Common Issues

• sitemap.html canonical was broken (pointed to /mapsite which 404'd on Vercel). The canonical should match the actual serving URL.
• sitemap.xml and sitemap-v2.xml were identical duplicates. Keep only one in robots.txt.
• Pages with og:description but no <meta name="description"> — Google uses the standard meta tag, not OG.
• www.signomy.xyz redirects with 307 (temporary) instead of 301. This is a Vercel dashboard setting, not configurable in vercel.json.

Devin Secrets Needed

None — SEO testing uses only public curl requests and source file inspection.