Every place page built its phase links as /schools/[slug]/[phase], the
shape that belongs to towns alone.
On an authority page that pointed into the town namespace. For 87 of the
151 authorities the target does not exist and the link 404s; for the
other 64 it resolves to the town of the same name — a different set of
schools, which is precisely the near-duplicate the two namespaces were
introduced to prevent. On an outcode page it 404s outright.
Two causes behind it, both a rule written twice and inherited by only
one of the places that needed it.
The authority phase route was in the spec and dropped by the plan, which
built the three bare routes and no fourth. The sitemap is generated from
the place registry, which was right about them all along, so 302
authority phase URLs have been submitted to Google and every one 404s.
Adding the route makes the sitemap true and serves a real query —
admissions are authority-run, so "primary schools in Kent" is how a
parent searches before they have settled on a town.
The outcode variants were the opposite: the registry computed phases for
outcodes although the spec gives them no route, and the sitemap knew to
skip them while the API did not. The registry now decides alone, and the
sitemap's duplicate of that rule is gone.
Also: an authority under the five-school threshold has no page, so the
API sends a null slug for it and the page names it without linking.
Two English authorities are in that position. It was unreachable in
today's data — verified across the EC and TR outcodes — but the thin
place redirect would have sent a reader to a 404 the year it isn't.
The e2e journey now walks every /schools link a page of each family
emits and requires a 200, which is the check that was missing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
/schools/[place]/[phase] shipped as routes but reached nothing. The sitemap
emitted one URL per registry entry and the registry had no phase dimension, so
~950 pages were absent from every sitemap — and PlaceView did not link them
either, leaving them reachable by nothing at all.
That is the query shape the baseline actually showed: 'primary schools in
beccles', 'secondary schools in brentwood'. Publishing the routes without a
path in meant building for the demand and then hiding from it.
Place now carries phase_urns so the per-phase threshold can be applied without
re-querying, the sitemap emits a variant wherever a phase clears the threshold
on its own, and the API exposes the qualifying phases so the place page links
only variants that exist. Outcodes are excluded: nobody searches 'primary
schools in SW11' and those routes do not exist.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
Separate children per family so Search Console reports the location layer's
indexation apart from the school pages' — which is the point of the index
built in W1, and the number the stop condition watches.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
_school_sitemap_rows tested only the latest year's row, which quietly dropped
every school with results in its history but a null row for the most recent
year — a school that stopped reporting, or whose figures were suppressed for
small-cohort disclosure.
The Mallard Academy (150367) is the case that caught it: real KS2 results for
2015-16 through 2018-19, then null rows from 2022-23 on. Its detail page shows
all four years; the sitemap omitted it. Sampling 40 of the 2,206 excluded
schools found 4 like this, so roughly 220 real pages were being withheld.
Publishable is now a property of the school, computed across every row, while
lastmod still comes from the latest row so the most recent Ofsted date wins.
The field list is a module constant shared with _has_publishable_data so the
two checks cannot drift.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
Search Console reports coverage per submitted sitemap, so one file per page
family is what will make W2's location pages measurable when they land. The
index's lastmod is generation time, which is the correct semantic there —
unlike on a <url>, where it would be a claim we cannot support.
Children sit under /sitemaps/ because Next only treats a whole bracketed path
segment as dynamic; a route folder named sitemap-[...parts] would be read as a
literal static segment and never match. Confirmed by the build output, which
lists /sitemaps/[...parts] as a dynamic route.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
Drops the schools with neither results nor an Ofsted grade, adds /admissions
which was never listed, replaces the invented priority and changefreq with a
lastmod taken from each school's Ofsted date.
lastmod is omitted where no date is known rather than defaulted to now. An
always-now lastmod is a claim Google learns to distrust; absent honestly
means unknown.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
The apex 301s to www at Cloudflare, but metadataBase, the school-page
canonical, robots.txt's Sitemap: line and the sitemap's own <loc> entries all
named the apex. Every one of those pointed Google at a redirect.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015mWQnpye9F299NVRCCSRvj
