Verdict
Unchanged from 10 August. The soft-404 fix that earned 11 points last week has held: every one of the 32 sitemap URLs returns a distinct document, and /zzz-fake-12345 returns a genuine HTTP 404 carrying noindex, nofollow. The answer library is still excellent and still 54 days old.
Score held at 89 with all six categories unchanged.
What's Working
- The 404 fix is stable. Unmatched routes return HTTP 404 with a real document containing
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">. Spot-checked six sitemap URLs: every md5 is distinct from the homepage and from each other. No catch-all behaviour of any kind.
- The blog is a purpose-built answer library. 20 posts, every one a question a person actually types: "When to book a Tomamu ski trip", "Tomamu vs Niseko for Australian skiers", "How many days at Tomamu", "Is Tomamu good for families", "Cost of a week ski trip to Tomamu", "New Chitose Airport to Tomamu". This is the best-targeted content set in the fleet.
- Review schema is real and attributed. Five Review nodes on the homepage with named reviewers — Ong C O, Robert Tan, Ben W, Stephen Dew — each with a 5/5 rating and Google as the source.
- Owner authority is specific and dated. "Steve has skied Hoshino Resorts Tomamu every season since 1999 and co-founded Alpha Ski Tomamu in 2023 alongside Rika." Named owners, named year, named relationship to the mountain, and Rika's Japanese-language role stated explicitly.
- Blog posts carry a full schema stack — Article, Blog, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage with Question/Answer nodes, Organization, Person, WebPage, ListItem.
- Numbers are concrete throughout: 12 metres of powder, 1,239 metres elevation, 29 trails, five lifts and a gondola, 90 minutes by Limited Express from New Chitose, A$299/night, three named units with their actual apartment codes.
Critical Issues
The blog has not published in 54 days (unchanged issue, already scored)
The lastmod series in the sitemap runs 20 May, 27 May, 3 June, 10 June, 17 June, 24 June — a disciplined weekly cadence that stopped dead. The most recent blog lastmod is 24 June 2026. The 3 August date in the sitemap belongs to a non-blog page.
This was flagged at 47 days on 10 August and scored then at 14/20. It is not being re-penalised today.
The timing is worth noting for planning rather than for scoring: Tomamu's season runs late November to early April, and Australian families book Japanese ski holidays from roughly August onward. The library is going stale precisely as the booking window opens.
Schema Inventory
| Page | Blocks | Types found |
|---|
| / | 8 | LodgingBusiness, LocalBusiness, WebSite, Review ×5, FAQPage |
| /blog/tomamu-ski-holiday-cost | multiple | Article, Blog, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, Question, Answer, ListItem, Organization, Person, WebPage |
No malformed JSON-LD detected.
Audit by Category
1. Technical Crawlability — 16/20 (unchanged)
- ✅ Server-rendered. Full body content from raw curl.
- ✅ Genuine 404 on unmatched routes, with noindex. The soft-404 fallback is confirmed fixed and stable.
- ✅ All 32 sitemap URLs are distinct real documents.
- ✅ robots.txt allows all, with sensible disallows on /admin, /guest and booking callbacks.
- ⚠️ robots.txt does not name AI crawlers individually. The wildcard covers them, but an explicit allow-list removes ambiguity.
- ⚠️ Sitemap
lastmod values are stale relative to the content.
2. Content Structure — 14/20 (unchanged)
- ✅ Single clear H1. Question-format H3s in the homepage FAQ.
- ✅ Five FAQ entries with direct, complete answers.
- ✅ First paragraph answers "what is this" immediately, with price and powder depth in the opening sentence.
- ⚠️ Homepage word count is 921 — adequate but the lightest of the strong performers.
- ⚠️ Homepage H2s are mostly statements ("Who we are", "The apartments") rather than questions.
3. Schema Markup — 17/20 (unchanged)
- ✅ LodgingBusiness is the correct specific type, paired with LocalBusiness.
- ✅ Review ×5 with named authors and ratings.
- ✅ FAQPage on the homepage and on blog posts. Article on posts.
- ❌ No AggregateRating node despite five individual 5/5 reviews being present.
- ❌ No Offer or Product schema on the three apartments despite an A$299/night rate being published.
4. E-E-A-T & Authority — 13/20 (unchanged)
- ✅ Named owner-operators with roles, nationality and languages spelled out.
- ✅ Founded 2023, on the mountain since 1999.
- ✅ Five attributed Google reviews.
- ❌ No author attribution on blog posts — the Person node exists in schema but no visible byline.
- ❌ No external citations or third-party coverage.
- ⚠️ No phone number published.
"telephone":"+61-418-781-180" is present in the JSON-LD and one PostalAddress node exists, but there is no tel: link in the visible page — a human reading the page has only an email address.
5. Blog & Content Freshness — 14/20 (unchanged)
- ✅ 20 posts, all crawlable, all in the sitemap, all with Article and FAQPage schema.
- ✅ Question-format titles across the whole library, targeting the real decision sequence a booker works through.
- ✅ Blog index page exists at /blog with all 20 posts linked.
- ❌ 54 days since the last post, against a previously weekly cadence.
- ⚠️
dateModified on the sampled post is 27 May — no refresh pass on older posts.
6. Entity Clarity — 15/20 (unchanged)
- ✅ Brand name consistent throughout.
- ✅ Niche is exceptionally tight: three named ski-in/ski-out apartments inside one named resort.
- ✅ Strong geographic signal — Tomamu ×64, Hokkaido ×11, Japan ×9, Sapporo ×4, plus The Tower named as the building. (The homepage analyser reports 0 location mentions because its regex only matches Australian place names; that is a tooling limitation, not a site defect.)
- ⚠️ No visible phone number weakens NAP completeness for a human reader.
- ⚠️ No Google Business Profile signals surfaced on the site.
Top 10 Action Items
| # | Action | Impact | Effort |
|---|
| 1 | Resume publishing — the Australian booking window for the 2026/27 season is open now | High | Medium |
| 2 | Add AggregateRating to consolidate the five existing Review nodes | High | Low |
| 3 | Add Offer/Product schema to each of the three apartments with the nightly rate | High | Low |
| 4 | Publish a visible tel: link alongside the email address | Medium | Low |
| 5 | Add a visible author byline to blog posts naming Steve or Rika | Medium | Low |
| 6 | Refresh dateModified on the 20 existing posts with a light seasonal update pass | Medium | Medium |
| 7 | Name AI crawlers explicitly in robots.txt rather than relying on the wildcard | Low | Low |
| 8 | Rewrite homepage H2s into question format to match the blog | Medium | Low |
| 9 | Expand the homepage past 1,200 words | Medium | Medium |
| 10 | Update sitemap lastmod values to reflect real content dates | Low | Low |
Summary
Alpha Ski Tomamu holds the gain it made last week. The routing fix is stable, the schema is well chosen, and the 20-post answer library is the most precisely targeted content in the fleet — it maps to the actual sequence of questions an Australian family works through when choosing between Tomamu and Niseko.
Two low-effort schema additions are sitting there uncollected: AggregateRating over five existing reviews, and Offer schema on three apartments with a published rate. Both are small edits with direct impact on how a model represents the business. The larger item is cadence — the library stopped growing on 24 June, right as the booking season started opening.