Signals Leftovers
No favicon declared
- Category
- Leftovers
- Direction
- Pushes the score up
- Weight
- +8
What it is
Scaffolding never cleaned up. One signal is not a verdict. The score is the whole weighted set, not any single line of it.
How it is weighted
8 points is mid-weight: real evidence, not a smoking gun. On its own it moves the number a few points.
This one is gated. It describes an absence, and an absence is only a tell in context — on a hand-typed page from 2003 a missing meta description is period-accurate, not evidence of a generator. It only counts when the page also shows modern build or styling signals.
What to do about it
Add a favicon and an apple-touch-icon.
Where it fires
None of our worked examples trip this one, which is itself informative — it means the pattern is rarer than the tells that fire constantly, so when it does show up it is worth paying attention to.