08-Aug-2026 — stop Google indexing junk walk URLs and tracking-label duplicates ref #297

build 816 — commit 8fdf586

What's new

Google Search Console was showing lots of pages that should not really be in the search index: cancelled and fully-booked walks listed in the sitemap, home-page copies with tracking labels like ?ref=ed_direct treated as separate pages, and walk addresses that no longer exist returned as a soft "page not found" (HTTP 200 with almost no content). This change tightens what we advertise to search engines and how we answer those requests, so the index can concentrate on real public pages.

At a glance

• Cancelled, draft, deleted and obviously non-public walks (for example titles or slugs containing "cancelled", "fully booked" or "we regret") are left out of sitemap.xml
• Addresses that only differ by tracking labels (ref, utm_*, gclid, and similar) permanently redirect to the clean address
• Cancelled walk pages ask crawlers not to index them
• Unknown /walks/... addresses that do not match a real walk return a proper not-found response instead of an empty-looking success page