This summer I built a little pet project. A simple site based on another site, a tool for ideating weapon ideas for a first person shooter. It’s found at https://tf2weapongenerator.netlify.app/
I was able to set it up to be deployed in Google, and things were going well, but in late November, my site suddenly fell in Google’s rankings for seemingly no reason. It still shows up on Google, but only if I search for it specifically (i.e. site:tf2weapongenerator.netlify.app). It’s nowhere within the first 10 pages, where previously it was on the second page (for the search “tf2 weapon generator”).
Note the site adds a hash to the base URL every time the user generates a new weapon (e.g. “tf2weapongenerator.netlify.app/#eyJwbGF5ZXJDb…”). However, this hadn’t caused any issue, it seemed.
URL inspection shows the site is still indexed.
My last commit before this problem started was Nov 14, where I added a percent sign into a string for one of the stats. I’m fairly certain this has nothing to do with the problem at all, given the nature of the change and the timing.
I’ve tried every fix I can come up with (perhaps not that many since I’m new to this):
- added a sitemap.xml which works fine via URL, but can’t be fetched by the Google Search Console
- added meta tags to the index.html for title, description, url, type, and the canonical URL
- redeployed several times on Netlify (always deploys fine)
I can post the code for my netlify.toml, sitemap.xml, and robots.txt.
Any fix would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!