Google Search Console showed zero indexed articles after three weeks of publishing. The articles existed. The URLs returned 200. The sitemap had been submitted. The problem was elsewhere: the blog listing loaded posts.json via fetch() , then rendered all the HTML in JavaScript. As far as Googlebot was concerned, the page was an empty shell with a spinner.

What follows is the set of fixes applied to the shared PHP template — no framework, no build step, plain Apache. Each point has a concrete reason, not just "SEO best practices say so".

The JS-first problem

Googlebot can execute JavaScript. Google has been saying this for years, and it's true. But "can" doesn't mean "systematically" or "immediately". JS crawling goes through a secondary rendering queue — plain HTML pages are indexed first.…