Google indexed 9,000 pages that said 'Loading…'

Google indexed 9,000 pages that said 'Loading…'

A travel SPA had 9,400 URLs in the index and almost no traffic. Coverage looked green. The mystery: impressions flatlined while indexed count rose. Here's the soft-404 hunt that explained it.

— In Search Console, URL Inspection → View Crawled Page → check the rendered HTML, not the response.
— I pasted that rendered HTML into a doc. Every page showed the same shell: nav, footer, and a spinner div.
— Then I disabled JS in DevTools and reloaded five sample URLs. All identical. The router never fired without JS, and Googlebot got the empty frame.

Turns out their data fetch lived in a useEffect that Googlebot's render queue timed out before resolving on slow third-party APIs.

The fix list: move first-paint data to getServerSideProps, add a 200-vs-empty guard that returns real status, ship a static fallback for the router.

Result: -71% organic at the low → recovered to +18% above baseline in 11 weeks as duplicate-shell pages collapsed into real content.