Indexing Problem - Seo

Develop, Build & Integrate CMS Development
1

Hi everyone,
I’m facing a critical SEO issue on a HubSpot site and would love some guidance from the community or the HubSpot team.

Background:

  • When the site was first launched, multilingual was enabled by mistake by the developers, even though the site is entirely in Italian.
  • This caused pages to be indexed with the ?hsLang=it parameter (e.g. /page-name?hsLang=it).

Current situation:

  • We’ve since disabled the multilingual feature, and now use clean URLs without parameters.
  • Canonical tags are correctly set to the clean version.
  • The robots.txt is standard (from HubSpot) and includes the sitemap directive manually.
  • The sitemap includes all pages except the homepage, despite several attempts to remove and re-add it from HubSpot’s page settings. It remains missing, and is not indexed.

The issue:

  • URLs with ?hsLang=it now result in a 307 Temporary Redirect to the clean URL.
  • Because of this, Search Console shows those pages as “Page with redirect”, and the clean version is not getting indexed.

Worse still:

  • In Search Console, no internal links are being detected for any pages — even though a crawl with Screaming Frog confirms that internal links are correctly present throughout the site (including menus, footers, and in-content links).

To summarize, we’ve:

  • Removed all ?hsLang=it references
  • Set clean canonical tags
  • Cleaned and resubmitted the sitemap
  • Ensured correct internal linking
  • Tried to resubmit URLs via Search Console
  • But indexing keeps dropping, and even the homepage is missing

Questions:

  1. Can we force a 301 redirect from ?hsLang=it to the clean URL version?
  2. Is it possible to disable or override the automatic 307 behavior for default-language pages?
  3. Why is the homepage excluded from the sitemap, even after multiple resaves in HubSpot?
  4. Could HubSpot’s rendering or theme setup be blocking Googlebot from detecting internal links?

Any advice or similar experiences would be super helpful. Thanks so much!

2

hi @MarkVolta
This one’s tricky because it sounds like you’re doing everything right technically, but HubSpot’s multilingual setup and sitemap behavior can leave residue that Google doesn’t forget quickly.
First off: no, HubSpot doesn’t let you override the 307 redirect to a 301 through the UI — it’s part of how it handles default language fallbacks under the hood. And yeah, the 307s are usually fine short term, but if Google crawled a bunch of ?hsLang=it links early on, that’s now baked into their index history, and it can take a while for them to let go of it.
For the sitemap issue: the homepage being missing is a known bug that’s popped up for a few users — even when it’s published and indexed fine otherwise, HubSpot sometimes just doesn’t include / in the sitemap XML. One hack I’ve seen: create a redirect from a dummy page (like /home-temp) to /, then set /home-temp as your homepage temporarily, save it, then flip it back. Sometimes that resets the flag. For the internal links: if Screaming Frog sees them but Search Console doesn’t, I’d check if you’ve got any JS-heavy elements in your nav or layout — HubSpot pages are server-rendered, but themes can mess with visibility depending on how menus are built. Also, make sure your nav is visible to crawlers (no lazy-loaded nav or JS-initiated headers).
One thing that’s helped me in this: crawl the site with Chrome’s “Googlebot” UA + disable JS, and look at what’s missing. You might find something blocking those menus from being seen.

Hope it helps.

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Ruben Burdin

Real-Time Data Sync Between any CRM or Database | Founder @Stacksync (YC W24)