What a broken sitemap taught me about technical SEO, ignored systems, and working in spaces where urgency is defined by someone else.
A Recent Lesson in Invisible Failures
Not long ago, I flagged a critical SEO issue in a project I was supporting. A sitemap that used to be manually managed, so we could control which pages got indexed—had been replaced by a dynamic setup. But the new system was incomplete.
The result?
- /sitemap.xml was returning a valid file structure, but with no actual entries
- /sitemap-0.xml, previously the primary index, returned a 404
- Search engines were left with no crawlable sitemap at all
Nobody caught it.
There were no automated alerts.
The change wasn’t documented.
The issue made it all the way to production before it was noticed—by me, through my usual manual Google Search Console checks.
What Broke Wasn’t Just the File
Yes, the immediate technical cause was a formatting mismatch in a .csv file—semicolons instead of commas due to European locale settings. But the real failure was cultural:
- No validation pipeline
- No QA on sitemap formatting
- No redirect safety net
- No ownership of search infrastructure
When the error was traced, the finger pointed to the person who supplied the file (me), not the system that lacked checks or fallback.
The Real Pattern: SEO Is Treated Like It Doesn’t Matter
This wasn’t the first time I experienced pushback when raising SEO issues. In fact, in the same thread where I reported the broken sitemap—calmly, with details and support—I was later told my communication was “aggressive.”
That’s not unusual when you’re a woman in a masculine tech culture—especially when you’re direct, Eastern European, and unapologetic about wanting things to work. What was labeled “aggression” was, in truth, urgency for something that directly impacts search visibility and traffic.
The deeper issue? SEO is rarely treated like it generates revenue for some businesses—until it breaks. Then it becomes everyone’s problem.
Requests that would take seconds on the server side (redirects, static file uploads, schema tweaks) are regularly pushed aside. And in environments where engineering owns infrastructure but doesn’t feel SEO urgency, this leads to fragility.
I Had Already Proposed a Solution
Weeks earlier, I had written a detailed proposal for automated monitoring using Screaming Frog CLI, integrated into the staging deployment pipeline. The goal was simple:
- Catch broken dynamic links (like breadcrumbs or sitemap entries)
- Prevent 404s from going live
- Protect SEO health proactively, not retroactively
The answer? “No bandwidth. Not a priority.”
So we deployed without checks, broke sitemap discoverability, and spent more energy fixing it in prod than it would’ve taken to prevent it in staging.
This Isn’t Just About SEO. It’s About Ownership and Visibility.
I’ve learned that being right isn’t enough. And doing your job well doesn’t protect you from being labeled difficult if your correctness is inconvenient.
In SEO and growth ops, a lot of our success depends on systems we don’t fully control:
- Routes we don’t own
- Environments we can’t touch
- Files we can’t deploy without help
So when we raise a flag, we’re often seen as blockers, not builders.
Especially if you’re a woman. Especially if you’re precise. Especially if you don’t soften your insights to protect someone else’s ego.
What I’ll Keep Doing Anyway
Despite all of this, I’ll keep:
- Monitoring what no one else is watching
- Proposing resilient systems, even when ignored
- Documenting patterns, not just bugs
- Taking responsibility, even when I don’t have authority
Because it’s not about being right. It’s about building things that don’t break silently.
What I Hope for Others
If you’re in growth, technical marketing, or SEO and feel like no one’s listening, you’re not alone.
You don’t need to shout.
But you do need to write it down.
Keep receipts. Track patterns. Propose solutions anyway.
Even if no one listens, the systems you design today will protect something bigger tomorrow.