Hey all – we run a Next.js e-commerce shop with ~400k product detail pages, hosted on Cloudflare. Main market: Germany, but we serve all EU countries.

In April 2025, we launched a brand-new .com domain using subfolders (/de, /fr, etc.). Root redirects to /de. We submitted sitemaps via GSC and saw steady growth – by July: 330k indexed, with ~37k for /de.

Then, indexing dropped hard:
→ 330k → 190k total
→ /de: 37k → 25k

Issues we fixed:

GSC couldn’t fetch 70+ product sitemaps (timeout)

hreflang mismatches between sitemap and pages

Wrong x-default (/en vs /de)

Rebuilt sitemap strategy: now only submit /de, use canonical + hreflang for others

We also:

Set all non-/de pages to noindex

Blocked other country paths in robots.txt (except /de)

Current issue:
→ /de now stuck at ~21k indexed
→ GSC sees 355k pages but won’t index them
→ “Discovered – not indexed” / “Crawled – not indexed”
→ Manual validation fails

Maybe performance-related?

Desktop Lighthouse: 66–90+

Mobile: often <50 (LCP + Speed Index are weak)

Looking for a deeply technical SEO engineer (paid):
✅ Crawl/indexing behavior at scale
✅ Next.js / Cloudflare audit
✅ Sitemap + canonical + hreflang logic
✅ Lighthouse performance

No general SEO consultants, please — we need technical help.

If you're this person or can refer someone, DM me. Thanks! 🙏