Every piece here names its sources and shows how the numbers were reached. Where we relied on somebody else's estimate, we say it is an estimate.
Everyone repeats that a new domain waits weeks or months to be indexed. I had six of them and an API that answers per URL, so I checked instead of repeating.
The redirect problem in sitemaps is real but small, and it hides in a place nobody looks: it shows up on sites that are otherwise immaculate. I also found one site I had to throw out of the study, and that turned out to be the more useful finding.
An argument about a footer turned into a script, and the script found that most of what we would have reported as internal linking was navigation repeated on every page.
I expected a boring afternoon and a post about how the professionals do it properly. The first page I checked had a hundred and thirty-three h1 tags.