<b>500 pages of content living at a single indexable URL</b>

<b>500 pages of content living at a single indexable URL</b>

A documentation site had 500 detailed pages and exactly one URL in Google's index. The whole site ranked for a single homepage term and nothing else.

The architecture explained it. The app used hash-based routing: <code>/docs#/getting-started</code>, <code>/docs#/api-reference</code>, and so on. Everything after the <code>#</code> is a fragment — browsers never send it to the server, and Google treats it as the same document. As far as the index was concerned, 500 pages of content were one URL that changed its DOM via JavaScript.

Every deep link, every internal reference, collapsed to <code>/docs</code>. There was nothing for Google to crawl or rank individually.

We migrated to the History API with real path-based routes and matching SSR, then submitted a full sitemap.

—Indexed URLs: 1 → 470 in 8 weeks
—Non-brand organic keywords: 12 → 1,900

The content was always there. It just lived behind a <code>#</code>, which is the URL equivalent of writing your address in invisible ink.