The prerender cache that lied for six weeks
A travel marketplace ran Rendertron self-hosted to feed Googlebot static HTML. Organic on programmatic city pages: -41% over six weeks, no algo update in sight.
The investigation started in the render cache. Rendertron has no built-in cache invalidation — they'd bolted on a 30-day TTL to save CPU. Googlebot was being served snapshots of inventory that had churned twice over. Live pages said '212 hotels'; the cached snapshot said '0 available'. Soft 404s piled up.
Turns out the tradeoff nobody priced in: Rendertron is a renderer, not a freshness system. Prerender.io ships recache-on-crawl and per-URL purge; Rendertron leaves that to you.
They didn't switch vendors. They wired a sitemap-lastmod webhook to purge changed URLs and dropped TTL to 24h.
Soft 404s: 1,900 → 60 in three weeks. Organic on city pages recovered to +9% versus the pre-decline baseline by week nine. The renderer was never broken. The cache policy was.
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The prerender cache that lied for six weeks
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