๐ง๐๐ ๐ฃ๐ฅ๐๐ฅ๐๐ก๐๐๐ฅ ๐ฅ๐๐ก ๐๐จ๐ง ๐ฃ๐๐๐๐ฆ ๐ช๐๐ฅ๐ ๐๐ ๐ฃ๐ง๐ฌ
A client site dropped out of Google index. Googlebot saw empty HTML shells. I built a prerender script to fix this. The script lived in the build pipeline. I assumed it worked.
Six months later, Google Search Console showed zero impressions. The script needed environment variables. These worked on my local machine. They were missing in Vercel.
The script did not crash. It logged a warning. It used a fallback sentence instead of real data.
Pages looked fine in your browser. React replaced the placeholder with data. Googlebot only saw the placeholder.
Fixes:
- Add keys to Vercel settings.
- Update fetch scripts for all directories.
Stop trusting green builds. Verify your output. Use curl to check your raw HTML.
Source: https://dev.to/henry_dan_81513dd35a2f540/the-prerender-was-running-the-pages-were-still-empty-2cc8