Technical SEO on viton13.com: 410s, redirects and release link checks

The starting point is the owner’s Google Search Console export for viton13.com. On 21 August 2026 Google counted 738 pages as indexed and 2,572 as not indexed. The main reasons: 1,331 pages discovered but not yet indexed, 673 addresses answering 404 (“not found”) and 383 pages crawled but not indexed.

The task was to give Google a clear answer for every address it still knew: removed pages marked as gone for good, moved pages sent to their new address, empty pages kept out of the index, and no internal link leading to a page that does not exist.

Retired addresses now answer 410 Gone, a status telling search engines that a page was removed on purpose and will not return, where a 404 only says “not found”. That covers 1,008 exact VJOURNAL URLs, the addresses under a pattern rule (removed auto-generated archive briefs and English slugs under /ru and /es) and 27 addresses from the site before 2026, such as old .html pages and /tproduct/ links. Another 74 retired stories redirect in one step to their surviving version.

Permanent redirects sit in one map of 141 rules. It holds old paths such as /oldmoneymen, which now leads to the Old Money men’s collection in the store, renamed service sections in all five languages, and the www address, which leads to the main domain. Topic pages with no stories carry noindex, an instruction asking search engines to keep a page out of their results, in each language where they are empty; their hreflang tags, which point Google to the other language versions, list only the languages where the page can be indexed.

In journal stories, service links that led to 404 pages were repointed: 4 targets in new links and 10 in stories already live, found by a crawl of 18,576 internal routes. A server error (500) on twelve localized VIT MARKET brand pages was fixed, the titles of 21 journal region and topic pages were brought to 39–52 characters, and seven stories now link to the service that answers them, in 35 editions with 35 different link texts.

Every request first passes the site’s proxy, a layer that runs before any page is built. It checks the path against the exact lists of retired and moved addresses, then against the pattern rules, and returns either a single permanent redirect (HTTP 308) or a 410 page with a noindex, nofollow header. The 141-rule map lives in one file that the routing layer reads, so each rule is written once.

For topic pages, indexing is set in the page’s Next.js metadata: a topic page can be indexed only in the languages where it has stories. The journal sitemap lists 13 of its 14 categories in each language and leaves out SMART, which has no stories yet. Before release, the SEO check confirms that each group of pages uses its intended hreflang format, and tests pin the title lengths, the journal link targets and the brand routes (5 of 5, 3 of 3 and 2 of 2 passed on 19 September 2026).

On 10 September 2026 two defects got through every automated check: 35 journal links pointing at 404 pages, then twelve brand pages answering 500. Since then the deploy starts the built release, crawls it and refuses to put it live if any internal link fails; the gate’s own test passes 9 of 9. Each release also sends the sitemap’s addresses to IndexNow, a protocol some search engines use to pick up changes; 65 URLs were accepted on 19 September 2026.

Today 1,008 retired VJOURNAL URLs and 27 addresses from the pre-2026 site answer 410 with noindex, 74 retired stories redirect to their surviving versions, and the permanent map holds 141 rules. Topic pages without stories are closed to indexing in each language where they are empty, and every deploy crawls the release before it goes live.

On 19 September 2026 we re-checked, one at a time, the 673 addresses the baseline export listed as not found (404): 604 now answer 410 Gone, 67 redirect (308) to a live page and 2 still answer 404.

This case shows what the site now answers, not what Google has done with it. There is no Search Console data from after the fixes yet, so we claim no change in indexing, rankings, clicks or traffic. The after measurement will be added from the same reports; a click-through baseline for the new titles, recorded on 10 September 2026, sets checks at 7, 14 and 28 days.

The comparison point is the baseline above: 738 indexed and 2,572 not indexed pages on 21 August 2026, and 69 clicks from 17,373 impressions in the 28 days from 30 July to 26 August 2026. The 604 / 67 / 2 split describes Google’s old 404 list on 19 September 2026, not a before-and-after of one release, and the Search Console figures cover only the main viton13.com property.