Developer fixes four-month Google invisibility caused by blank React pages at index
A solo developer discovered that her personal site, chaotictoejam.com, had been nearly invisible to Google for four months after rebuilding it as a React application. Google Search Console revealed only one indexed page and five total clicks, despite the domain having years of history as a WordPress blog. The root cause was a faulty prerender step that served blank HTML shells for the six most important top-level routes, making them appear as identical empty pages to Googlebot on its first crawl pass. While Google can eventually execute JavaScript to read client-rendered content, this slower second-wave indexing created a duplicate and thin-content problem that hurt rankings. The fix involved adding a static metadata function, per-route structured data, and updating the prerender script to bake real HTML into each top-level route before deployment.
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