A real estate platform gets millions of pages indexed in hours
A home search site with millions of URLs was slow to load and slow to get indexed. Server-side rendering and a new indexing setup fixed both and lifted organic visibility by 321%.
The results
Where things stood
The client is a real estate platform where people search for homes. Like most sites of its kind, it's huge. Every listing, neighborhood, city and search filter can have its own page, which adds up to millions of URLs. And the pages keep changing, because new listings go up and sold homes come down every day.
Two technical problems were holding the site back, and they made each other worse.
The first was speed. The site was built so that much of each page loaded in the visitor's browser through JavaScript. That made pages slow to appear, especially on phones, and its PageSpeed score showed it. Slow pages hurt rankings, and they lose visitors before the page even finishes loading.
The second was indexing. Google can read JavaScript pages, but it has to render them first, and that takes time and resources. At that scale, Google can't render everything quickly. New pages were taking days to get indexed.
In real estate, a new listing gets most of its interest when it first goes up, and some homes sell within a week. A listing page that Google finds days late misses a big part of the searches it could have won.
Across millions of pages, that adds up to a lot of lost traffic.
What we did
We worked on both problems together, because fixing the way pages load also makes them easier for Google to read.
For speed, we put server-side rendering in place. With server-side rendering, the server builds each page before sending it, so the content arrives ready to show. Visitors see the page faster, and Google gets the full content on its first visit without waiting to render anything. We wrote clear specs for the client's developers and worked with them as the changes rolled out, page type by page type. The PageSpeed score climbed into the high 80s.
For indexing, we gave Google clear and fast paths to the pages that mattered. On a site this big, the main job is helping Google spend its time well. We kept low-value URLs, like endless filter combinations, out of the crawl. We set up sitemaps that update as new listings go live, and we made sure new pages were linked from the pages Google visits most. That way, a new listing gets noticed almost as soon as it's published.
We kept watching the server logs and Google's indexing reports as each change went out. That showed which page types were getting indexed quickly and which still needed work.
What changed
More listings got into Google while they were still fresh, and the pages that ranked loaded quickly for the people who clicked.
What other large sites can take from this
On a site this big, technical SEO decides how much of it Google can see at all. If your pages depend on JavaScript to show their content, or new pages take days to appear in Google, you're losing traffic every day it continues.
Server-side rendering and a clear indexing setup are big pieces of work, and they usually need your developers. They're also some of the changes with the largest payoff a big site can make, because they lift every page at once.
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