<b>The prerender service was serving Googlebot a six-week-old site</b>

<b>The prerender service was serving Googlebot a six-week-old site</b>

A classifieds platform did everything by the book — dynamic rendering, a headless prerender service feeding crawlers static HTML. Then fresh listings stopped getting indexed entirely. New URLs just never appeared.

We spoofed the Googlebot user agent and hit a brand-new listing. The prerender service returned a 200 with a perfect page — for a listing that had expired five weeks earlier. The cache was the problem. The prerender layer had a 60-day TTL and no invalidation hook. It was confidently serving crawlers a snapshot of a site that no longer existed, while real users saw the live version.

Google was indexing a frozen ghost of the site. New content wasn't missing — it was being overwritten by stale cache on every crawler request.

We added cache purging on publish and capped the TTL at 24 hours.

—New listings indexed within 48h: 4% → 91%
—Average age of prerendered HTML served: 38 days → 9 hours

Dynamic rendering is only as fresh as its cache. A stale prerender layer is a time machine pointed the wrong way.