The Silent Sitemap Bug That Blocked Google From Indexing My Sites
When I checked Google Search Console after a month, only 2 of my 8 sites were indexed. The other 6 had zero pages in Google's eyes. No penalty, no error banner. Just silence. The bug My build script generated the sitemap by mapping over page objects. Somewhere a URL field was an object, not a string. So the sitemap shipped lines like: <url><loc> https://example.com/[object Object] </loc></url> Google fetched the sitemap, saw garbage URLs, and quietly skipped the whole file. No crawl, no index. How I caught it GSC > Sitemaps > it said "Success" but "Discovered pages: 0". That mismatch is the tell. I opened the raw sitemap.xml in the browser and searched for [object . There it was. Root cause: url: page.url where page.url was itself { path, params } , not a string. The fix // before loc : page . url // -> [object Object] // after loc : `https://livephotokit.com ${ page . path } ` Redeployed, resubmitted the sitemap, and requested indexing on the core pages. Pages started landing in the index within a couple of days. Takeaway A "Success" status on your sitemap does not mean Google read your URLs. Always open the raw XML and eyeball it. One bad [object Object] can silently sink an entire site. I'm building LivePhotoKit and a handful of other small tools solo with AI. Sharing the real bugs as I hit them.