August 25, 2026
The Recommendations That Pointed Nowhere
Recommendation links on twenty seven product pages pointing at four products that are no longer on the site
Most of our product pages carry a short list of reasons to skip the thing we are showing you. Some of those lines end with a suggestion: if this is not for you, here is one that might be. On twenty seven pages, that suggestion linked to a product that is no longer on this site.
What was wrong. Four products left the catalogue at some point and nothing swept the pages that recommended them. The links stayed, and they went nowhere. One page carried the problem twice, so twenty eight sentences in total sent a reader to a page that does not exist. The oldest of them had been live since the middle of July.
What we changed, and what we deliberately did not. We removed the recommendation and kept the reason. A line that read “prefers matching sets over individual pieces” and then pointed at a missing product now simply reads “prefers matching sets over individual pieces”, which is the part that was ever any use to you.
We did not swap in a different product, and that was the whole decision. Every one of those sentences described the specific thing it recommended: a four hundred year ceramic heritage, a five hundred piece puzzle guided only by colour, a brass hook from a Nagoya workshop. Keeping the sentence and changing the product underneath it would have made a true description point at something it was never written about. That is not a broken link being fixed. That is us publishing a claim we never checked, and we would rather lose the recommendation.
One page was different. On our Arita plate the missing product was named inside a comparison rather than offered as an alternative, so we took the link off and kept every word.
How we checked. We rebuilt the list of what is actually on this site and swept our published writing against it: 386 product pages, 757 lab notes and 26 guides, counted from that rebuilt list on the day of the fix. That found three more broken sentences than the original report from 14 July had, and it cleared six the report still listed as broken which had already been fixed. It also found a link that only worked because a redirect quietly caught it, on the note explaining what our verification badge means. A link that survives on a redirect is a link we got wrong, so we pointed it where it belongs.
After the fix we ran the same sweep again. There are no links to missing pages left on this site.
What this does not fix. The four products are gone and are not coming back, so if you followed one of those suggestions before today, there was nothing at the other end. We are sorry for the dead end. Nothing here checked our own outbound links on a schedule, which is why this was reported on 14 July and closed on 25 August rather than the same afternoon. That gap is now on our own list.