Setting up monitoring for a handful of retainer clients and I’m trying not to drown in noise. Last time I did this I had so many alerts that I started ignoring all of them, which defeats the point.
What I’m keeping so far:
– robots.txt changed
– noindex or canonical changed on any of the top 200 pages
– homepage or key template returns non-200
– sitemap URL count changes by more than 10%
– GSC clicks down 30%+ week over week
What I dropped:
– title tag changes (too many, clients edit them all the time)
– every new 404
What’s on your list? Anything that saved you from a real disaster that I’m missing?
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