As the web gets more complex, with JavaScript framework and library front ends on websites, progressive web apps, single-page apps, JSON-LD, and so on, we’re increasingly seeing an ever-greater surface area for things to go wrong. When all you’ve got is HTML and CSS and links, there’s only so much you can mess up. However, in today’s world of dynamically generated websites with universal JS interfaces, there’s a lot of room for errors to creep in.
The second problem we face with much of this is that it’s hard to know when something’s gone wrong, or when Google’s changed how they’re handling something. This is only compounded when you account for situations like site migrations or redesigns, where you might suddenly archive a lot of old content, or re-map a URL structure. How do we address these challenges then?