Genuinely asking because I just spent 2 months fixing every technical thing I could find on my own site (pre-rendering, canonical/redirect loops, hreflang, internal linking, sitemap) and indexed pages stayed stuck at exactly 2 the whole time.

Turned out Googlebot was rendering the pages fine — a chunk of them just had never been crawled at all, weeks after being in the sitemap. The domain had migrated earlier this year and has almost no backlinks outside a few self-referential ones.

So now I’m wondering if that’s the actual bottleneck — Google not prioritizing crawl on a low-authority domain — rather than anything technical. Anyone else run into this on a migration? Did building real backlinks end up mattering more than expected?