Problems with Google Bot
Our company webpage was built with Nuxt 3.17.4 + Storyblok and deployed with Vercel. Since the begining of the year we started having problems with Google Crawler.
For context:
1. All pages are marked as indexed, however, using Google Search Console to analyse what Google Crawler indexes, we found out that most of the pages show an empty body. Meaning that <div id="__nuxt"></div> is empty.
2. This happens randomly, the same page can sometimes render correctly, other times doesn't show any content at all.
3. When we use Live Test Tool of Google Search Console no errors are shown. Everything is working as expected.
What have we tried so far?
1. Change rendering from SSR to SSG. We can see all pages pre-rendered pages correctly deployed in Vercel, still the problems persists.
2. When javascript is disable the webpage works as expected. All content is correctly rendered.
3. We made sure that the client side code was not running in server side.
4. We've hired a Nuxt professional who fixed a lot of problems and small errors we had. Still he wasn't able to understand the problem as well.
WE ARE LOOSING FAITH... đŚ
It's been very hard to find the root cause of the problem, we spent 2 months trying to fix this. Google doesn't provide us any support. We have no way to see which kind of errors may be happening with Google Crawler, and all the testing tools that exist don't find any problem at all. We were expecting SSG would actually fix the problem, because, in the end we are just serving static pages. Still, it does not work.
Anyone as ever faced any problem similar to this that can help us? We are reaching a point where abandoning Nuxt is an option, which we would like to avoid. But we can't see any other alternative given the damage in our SEO.
4 Replies
Hi @FĂĄbio. I'm kapa.ai, your friendly support bot. I will try to answer your question by searching through the knowledge base. :wave:
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I'm sorry to hear about your difficulties with Googlebot and Nuxt. Based on the knowledge sources provided, here are some relevant insights and possible directions:
1. Similar Issues Reported
There have been reports of Googlebot indexing Nuxt sites and showing empty bodies or 500 errors in search results, even when everything appears fine in local tests and with the Google Search Console Live Test Tool. This issue is not unique to your setup and has affected other Nuxt users as well, including those deploying to Vercel and Netlify. The root cause seems to be related to how Googlebot processes JavaScript and caches resources, sometimes leading to missing JS chunks or exhausting a JS "budget," which results in empty or error pages being indexed by Googlebot, even though the site works for regular users and in live tests fix(nuxt): suppress client-side errors by crawlers 500 - Internal Server Error on Google search page.
2. Suppression of Client-Side Errors for Crawlers
A recent fix in Nuxt (v3.17.5 and later) specifically addresses this issue by suppressing full-page errors when triggered by crawlers or bots. This is a hotfix for a problem that appears to be partly on Google's side, where their crawler may try to execute JavaScript after a deploy when some JS chunks are no longer available, or it may hit a resource limit. The fix prevents a 500 error page from being rendered for bots, which should help with the issue of empty or error pages being indexed fix(nuxt): suppress client-side errors by crawlers.
3. Reindexing and Patience
Even after applying the fix, some users reported that Google continued to show the error for a while. However, after reindexing and waiting, the correct content eventually appeared in search results. This suggests that Google's cache may take time to update, and repeated reindexing requests may be necessary 500 - Internal Server Error on Google search page.
4. Static Site Generation (SSG) and Pre-rendering
Switching to SSG (static site generation) should, in theory, eliminate these issues since the output is plain HTML. However, if Googlebot is still seeing empty bodies, it may be due to how the static files are being served or cached, or possibly due to a misconfiguration in the deployment. Make sure that your deployment is serving the pre-rendered HTML files directly and not falling back to a client-side render for bots.
5. No Evidence of a Nuxt-Specific Bug
The knowledge sources do not indicate a fundamental bug in Nuxt's SSG or SSR that would cause this issue in all cases. The problem seems to be a combination of how Googlebot interacts with modern JavaScript frameworks and how deployments are handled (especially after updates or redeploys).
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Recommendations:
- Ensure you are using the latest Nuxt version (v3.17.5 or later) to benefit from the crawler error suppression fix.
- After deploying fixes, use Google Search Console to request reindexing of affected pages and allow some time for Google's cache to update.
- Double-check your Vercel deployment to confirm that static HTML is being served for all routes and that there are no misconfigurations causing fallback to client-side rendering.
- If the problem persists, consider reaching out in Nuxt community channels or opening a detailed issue with reproduction steps, as this may help surface edge cases not yet addressed.
I hope this helps clarify the situation. The knowledge sources confirm that you are not alone in facing this issue, and recent Nuxt updates have specifically targeted this problem. If you continue to experience issues after following these steps, it may be worth monitoring Nuxt's GitHub for further updates or workarounds fix(nuxt): suppress client-side errors by crawlers 500 - Internal Server Error on Google search page.
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