My personal site was invisible to Google for four months
I am not an SEO expert. Louder for those in the back. I AM NOT AN SEO EXPERT. I've never been into marketing, social media is a necessary evil for me. But if I want to provide free content... well, I need people to be able to find the free content. So begrudgingly, I monitor things (albeit not often enough) one of those is Google Search Console. So a few weeks ago I checked Google Search Console…
The author of chaotictoejam.com was unaware that his personal site was invisible to Google for four months. Despite running the site since 2017, the site's indexing was minimal and Google appeared to only index one page and register five clicks. The domain had a rich history, first as a cooking blog and later as a crafting blog before being rebuilt as a React site.
The issue lay with the site's homepage, which served empty, identical pages. This was due to a prerendering issue: six top-level routes were empty, causing Google to see the content as thin and duplicate. Implementing prerendering for these static routes fixed the problem. This change also allowed the author to discover other bugs, such as a hand-built page that was never prerendered and duplicate structured data in resource pages.
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