Project Overview
Real Estate SaaS Website for Confidential Real Estate Platform
Problem
Google Search Console was reporting 404 errors for live pages on a React-powered real estate listings website hosted via AWS S3 and served through CloudFront CDN, making key pages non-indexable and harming organic visibility.
My Role
Acted as an informal technical consultant, diagnosing the issue and providing the solution strategy to the development team via an SEO specialist contact.
Solution Strategy
- Identified that the React SPA was not handling route requests correctly through S3/CloudFront, causing deep links to return 404 errors.
- Created a technical briefing document outlining the issue and suggested setting **Error Document** and **Index Document** to `index.html` in the S3 static website hosting settings.
- Recommended updating the CloudFront behavior's Error Responses configuration to redirect 404 errors to `index.html` with an HTTP 200 status.
- Provided testing methods using `curl`, Googlebot headers, Thunder Client, and GSC's URL Inspection tool.
- Shared the technical walkthrough and visuals with the internal dev team via the SEO contact.
Testing & Validation
- Tested routes using `curl -A Googlebot` to mimic crawler behavior for deep links.
- Checked real-time response headers and payload content for route consistency.
- Validated fixes in Google Search Console (URL Inspection Tool) — no 404s post-implementation.
- Used Thunder Client for API route and CDN response verification.
Final Result
Pages started returning proper 200 status responses with correct HTML payloads for both Googlebot and browsers. URL inspection confirmed successful indexing, resolving the SEO visibility issue.
Tech Stack
React, AWS S3, CloudFront, Google Search Console, curl, Thunder Client