Manual contradicts itself

Why it matters

If page 4 says everything on blue is white and page 17 allows light blue on blue, nobody knows which rule applies. Whoever builds the site picks one, and the next person picks the other. Snaglist reports it, because then the mistake is in the manual and not in the site.

How Snaglist checks it

When Snaglist reads your manual, it looks for places that contradict each other, with an AI model, and compares the colour rules with each other by itself. Both places must be quoted literally from the manual, otherwise they are dropped. You see them on the site page before they count, and you can untick them. Whatever stays ticked is in the crawl report, with both quotes and their pages. A new manual replaces them.

Snaglist reports this as a notification. It costs 2 percent of the page in the health score. Good to know, and sometimes a deliberate choice.

Common causes

• A rule that changed in one place only
• A table added later than the text
• Two people who each wrote a chapter
• An exception that is not named as an exception

How to fix it

1. Read both quotes in the detail.
2. Choose which rule applies.
3. Change the manual and upload the new version on the site page.
4. If it is not a real contradiction, untick it under the rules on the site page.

How it shows in the report

In the report for your client this appears under the heading "Your manual gives two answers to the same question". When everything is in order, the report says: "The manual does not contradict itself".