I relaunched my portfolio on the Next.js App Router, submitted the sitemap, and waited. A week later Google Search Console still said 0 pages indexed — everything sat in "Crawled – currently not indexed."

My first instinct was the usual: time and domain authority. Both are real for a new site. But before you blame Google, it's worth ruling out the self-inflicted version — because in my case there was one, and it's a trap that's very easy to fall into with the App Router's metadata API.

The gotcha: an inherited canonical

In the App Router you set metadata in layout.tsx or page.tsx . It's tempting to put your canonical URL once, in the root layout :

// app/layout.tsx — DON'T do this export const metadata : Metadata = { metadataBase : new URL ( " https://example.com " ), alternates : { canonical : " / " }, };

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Metadata inherits . So every route under that layout — /about , /projects , every post — renders <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/"> .…