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i18n: localized 404s recur, common-4xx-errors missing in de/es/pt-BR (hreflang points at 404s) #285

Description

@Mlaz-code

Semrush Site Audit (Jul 10 crawl) found 3 broken locale variants of the api-reference page added Jul 8, all verified live with curl on Jul 10 AND still 404 on Jul 12:

The EN page declares hreflang alternates to all 3 missing URLs in BOTH the HTML head and the sitemap xhtml:link entries, and the language switcher links to them too. Sitemap has 58 EN URLs vs 57 per locale, confirming only this page lacks translations. Ahrefs Site Audit independently flags the same 3 broken pages.

Impact: Semrush Site Health -4, International SEO score -9, 3 hreflang errors, 3x 404 crawl waste.

This is the SAME failure mode as May 2026 (asyncapi.yaml, entity-reference-ids, polymarket-resolution: 10 404s then, later fixed) and the second occurrence in two months. The docs i18n pipeline emits hreflang + switcher links for every locale regardless of whether the translated page exists, so EVERY new EN-only page recreates this.

Two-part fix:

  1. Short term: translations for de/es/pt-BR of api-reference/common-4xx-errors. (PR incoming from Nova.)
  2. Systemic (the real ask): make hreflang + language-switcher emission conditional on the translated file existing, so new EN pages stop shipping broken alternates.

Minor footnote: /de/api-reference/ (section index, not in sitemap) returns 404 while /es/ and /pt-BR/ equivalents 308 redirect. Cosmetic inconsistency.

Filed via gh because the Paperclip API is unreachable (192.168.4.151:3100 connection refused, 2nd day).

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