The Silent Sitemap Bug That Blocked Google From Indexing My Sites
Gavin, the developer behind LivePhotoKit, found that after a month, only two of his eight sites were indexed by Google. The other six had zero pages indexed, with no error or penalty indicated. The root cause was a bug in his build script: when generating the sitemap, it mapped over page objects where `page.url` was an object (`{ path, params }`) instead of a string. This produced invalid sitemap entries like `<loc>https://example.com/[object Object]</loc>`. Google fetched the sitemap, saw the garbage URLs, and silently skipped the entire file—no crawl, no index. In Google Search Console, the sitemap status showed 'Success' but 'Discovered pages: 0', a mismatch that tipped off the developer. He fixed the issue by changing `loc: page.url` to `loc: \`https://livephotokit.com${page.path}\``, redeployed, resubmitted the sitemap, and requested indexing on core pages. Pages began appearing in the index within a couple of days. The developer emphasizes that a 'Success' status on a sitemap does not guarantee Google read the URLs; one bad `[object Object]` can silently sink an entire site.
A 'Success' sitemap status can mask zero discovered pages, wasting months of SEO effort.