Kamil Owczarek
Published on

The Sitemap Bug That Hid All Our Products From Google

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The Discovery: Where Did All Our Products Go?

Last week I was checking our Google Search Console when something felt off. Our e-commerce site has thousands of products, hundreds of news articles, dozens of inspiration pages—but the indexed page count was suspiciously low.

I pulled up our sitemap at /sitemap.xml and started digging. That's when I noticed something strange: only our collection pages were appearing in the sitemap. Products, news, inspirations, categories, designers—all missing.

We serve 11 international markets with localized URLs. Thousands of pages, just... gone from Google's radar.

The Investigation: A Simple Exclude List

Our nuxt.config.ts had what looked like a reasonable sitemap configuration:

// nuxt.config.ts - The problematic configuration
sitemap: {
  exclude: [
    '/dashboard/**',
    '/product/**',
    '/news/**',
    '/faq/**',
    '/inspirations/**',
    '/bathroom/**',
    '/kitchen/**',
    '/designers/**',
    '/list-of-landings/**',
    '/satisfaction-survey/**',
    '/clipboard',
  ],
  cacheMaxAgeSeconds: 86400,
}

Wait, why were we excluding /product/**? That seemed wrong. But here's where it got interesting—those exclusions were originally added to prevent dynamic route generation for pages that had their own sitemap sources.

The thinking was: "Don't auto-generate these URLs because we're adding them manually via sitemap sources." Reasonable, right?

Wrong.

The Root Cause: Nuxt Sitemap's Hidden i18n Behavior

Here's what the @nuxtjs/sitemap module does that isn't immediately obvious from the documentation:

When you have i18n configured, exclude patterns are automatically expanded to all language prefixes.

So this:

exclude: ['/product/**']

Silently becomes this:

exclude: [
  '/product/**', // Polish (default, no prefix)
  '/en/product/**', // English
  '/de/product/**', // German
  '/uk/product/**', // Ukrainian
  '/ru/product/**', // Russian
  '/hu/product/**', // Hungarian
  '/ro/product/**', // Romanian
  '/fr/product/**', // French
  '/sl/product/**', // Slovenian
  '/it/product/**', // Italian
  '/es/product/**', // Spanish
]

Every single product URL—in every language—was being excluded from the sitemap. The same for news, inspirations, categories, and everything else in that list.

Why Collections Still Worked

One clue helped me crack this: collections were appearing in the sitemap. Why?

Collections use a Polish path structure: /kolekcja/[name] instead of /collection/[name]. Since /kolekcja/** wasn't in the exclude list, those URLs survived.

This was the "aha" moment. The exclusion wasn't failing silently—it was working exactly as designed. We just didn't realize what it was designed to do.

The Fix: 9 Lines Deleted

The solution was embarrassingly simple:

// nuxt.config.ts - The fixed configuration
sitemap: {
  exclude: [
    '/dashboard/**',
    '/panel/**',
    '/clipboard',
  ],
  cacheMaxAgeSeconds: 86400,
}

That's it. Remove the overly broad exclusions. Keep only the admin panels and utility pages that genuinely shouldn't be indexed.

9 lines deleted. Thousands of pages restored to Google.

The Aftermath

After deploying the fix:

  • Sitemap regenerated with all product URLs across 11 languages
  • News, inspirations, categories, and designers all restored
  • Google Search Console started showing the expected page count
  • Re-indexing requests submitted for priority pages

The site had been running with this misconfiguration for weeks. That's weeks of new products, new articles, and new content that Google couldn't see.

Lessons Learned

1. Sitemap Exclusions Are More Powerful Than They Look

In a multi-language Nuxt app, one exclude pattern multiplies by your language count. Be extremely careful with wildcards.

2. Test Your Sitemap Manually

I should have been checking /sitemap.xml regularly. A simple visual inspection would have caught this immediately.

3. Question Inherited Configurations

This exclude list was added months ago with good intentions. But the original context was lost, and no one questioned whether it still made sense.

4. The "It Works Locally" Trap

In development, you might not notice sitemap issues because you're not checking SEO tooling. This bug only became visible when examining production SEO performance.

How to Verify Your Sitemap

Quick checks you can do right now:

# Fetch your sitemap and count URLs
curl -s https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml | grep -c "<loc>"

# Check for a specific path that should exist
curl -s https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml | grep "product"

# If using sitemap index, check individual sitemaps
curl -s https://yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml

In Nuxt with i18n, your sitemap index should contain separate sitemaps for each language:

  • /en-sitemap.xml
  • /de-sitemap.xml
  • etc.

Make sure URLs appear in ALL of them, not just the default language.

The Takeaway

Sometimes the biggest SEO disasters come from the smallest configuration changes. A 10-line exclude list, added with good intentions, silently blocked thousands of pages from search engines for weeks.

If your indexed page count seems low, check your sitemap configuration first. And remember: in multi-language Nuxt apps, exclude patterns are way more aggressive than they appear.

Real debugging story from an e-commerce platform serving 11 European markets. The fix took 2 minutes. Finding it took much longer.

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