How Walker Sands used Sitebulb to fix JavaScript issues and reverse a huge drop in indexed pages

This SEO case study documents a successful optimization initiative, providing actionable insights for practitioners. The documented approach demonstrates how strategic SEO implementation drives measurable results.

Initial Situation

Understanding the starting point is essential context for evaluating any case study. This documentation covers the initial challenges, competitive position, and business objectives that shaped the SEO strategy.

Strategy and Approach

The strategic approach combined multiple SEO disciplines to address identified opportunities. Key decisions around prioritization and resource allocation provide a template for similar initiatives.

Implementation

Moving from strategy to execution required specific technical implementations, content development, and process changes. This case study documents the practical steps that translated strategy into action.

Results and Learnings

The outcomes demonstrate effectiveness through measurable improvements in rankings, traffic, and business metrics. Analysis of successes and challenges provides learning value for practitioners.

Case studies like this contribute to the SEO knowledge base, helping practitioners learn from documented real-world experiences.

Source: https://sitebulb.com/resources/case-studies/walker-sands-case-study/

Practitioner Notes: Reading a Drop in Indexed Pages

When indexed pages fall off a cliff, the instinct is to suspect a penalty. In practice the cause is far more often mechanical: Google can still crawl the URL, but the content, the internal links, or the indexing directives it needs are no longer visible in what it renders. JavaScript dependent templates are a frequent source of this exact failure, which is what makes the Walker Sands work a useful teaching case.

Sitebulb helps because it crawls in two distinct modes. It fetches the raw HTML that the server returns, and it also renders each page with a headless Chrome instance and captures the rendered HTML after JavaScript executes. Placing the two side by side is the fastest way to expose content, links, canonicals and robots tags that only appear after the browser runs code. If a primary block of copy exists in the rendered view but not the raw view, you have found your regression.

The usual culprits cluster into a few patterns. Internal links get injected by JavaScript, so the crawler under discovers deeper pages. A canonical tag or a meta robots value gets written by client side code and points somewhere wrong, or worse, sets noindex. The main content loads through a client side fetch that quietly fails or times out for the crawler. Hydration errors leave the DOM half built. Each of these looks fine to a human clicking around in a browser, which is why the two mode crawl is so valuable. Our wider JavaScript SEO case studies collect more variations of this same failure.

The fix pattern is consistent. Move the critical content and the internal links into the server rendered HTML, whether through server side rendering, static generation, or prerendering for bots. Make sure the canonical and the robots directives live in the raw HTML and resolve to the correct values. Remove any accidental noindex. Then resubmit key URLs and watch the indexed count climb back in the coverage report. For the underlying question of how much JavaScript Google will render at all, the classic Google JavaScript crawling study is essential background.

What's Changed Since

Googlebot is now evergreen, running a current Chromium build, so it renders modern JavaScript far better than the crawler of a few years ago. That is the good news. The catch is that rendering is deferred to a second wave and consumes crawl budget, so large JavaScript sites still lose coverage when critical content depends on the render. The evergreen renderer closed many gaps, but it did not make rendering free.

Crawler tools now default to rendered crawling, yet the raw versus rendered comparison is still the diagnostic that matters most. The other change worth using is the URL Inspection live test in Search Console, which shows the rendered DOM and the HTTP response Google actually sees for a single URL. When you think you have fixed a regression, that live test is how you confirm it before waiting on reprocessing. If you want to compare two sites that made opposite rendering choices, the two JavaScript sites comparison is a good next read.

Raw HTML versus Rendered HTML: What to Compare

Frequently Asked Questions