Forty thousand pages indexed. All of them the same page.

Forty thousand pages indexed. All of them the same page.

A classifieds marketplace ran a Vue SPA with no SSR. Each listing had a unique URL, unique title, unique everything — to a human. To Google's initial crawl, every URL returned the identical empty index.html and a 200 status.

The symptom showed up in Search Console as a creeping wave of 'Crawled — currently not indexed.' 38,000 URLs in eight weeks. The team assumed thin content and started writing more descriptions. Wrong patient.

Turns out Google's two-wave rendering was the trap: it fetched the shell, queued the page for the render budget, and the render queue was weeks deep. By the time JS executed, the freshness signal was gone. For most URLs it never got there at all. Soft 404 because the pre-render HTML had zero unique content and a default meta.

We added prerendering for bots via a middleware that served static snapshots to crawler user-agents — full HTML, real titles, real status codes, including hard 404s for dead listings.

Indexation went from 11% to 84% of submitted URLs in seven weeks. Organic sessions: +210% over four months.

The render queue was the bottleneck. We stopped waiting in it.