edharris

Hi @MattBairdSound If the site at the new domain is intended to fully replace the site that was at the old domain there are a couple of important things to do (some of which you may have already done). Add the old domain as a secondary domain to the main, new site. This means any hits to URLs with the old domain will be redirected to the new site. For any pages where the URL slug has changed from the old site to the new one, make sure there's a URL Redirect rule in places to the user (and Google's crawlers) get to the correct place. Verify ownership of both the old domain and the new one in Google Search Console. Once you have Google Search Console properties verified for both, complete the Change of Address form in Search Console to notify Google that your website has moved from the old domain to the new one. You'll have to wait a few weeks for Google to register this change, recrawl the new domain, and start showing updated results in the index. It can be a slow process – I've seen it take a few weeks. That's why you want to set up the secondary domain and redirects in the meantime so the old results Google still displays get users to the right place. LMK if you need help implementing any of this. - Ed -- Blue Hills Digital Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works. Resource: Squarespace SEO Checklist: 2023 Update

Hi @Hakora It looks like Google has successfully indexed some pages from your website. When I run a search for your brand name "iyanda el designs" I see your homepage showing as the second result in the SERP. See screenshot attached. It's hard to speculate about the other error messages you may be seeing from Google Search Console without looking at the property directly, but it's not uncommon for Google to show error or warning messages like the ones in your screenshots after crawling a website. Not all of these are cause for concern, it just depends which specific URLs they apply to. If you're looking to get more URLs from your website indexed and showing up in search results, start by thinking through who the target audience is and what search queries they might be entering into Google. Then take a look at the existing search engine results pages (SERPs) for those queries. That's your competition. From there, you can start building URLs that might compete with the URLs Google has currently selected as the "best" URLs to show for those search queries. The most important thing to focus on is high quality content that Google will not only index but also choose to rank highly compared to the competition. Hope that helps. Good luck! - Ed -- Blue Hills Digital Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works. Resource: Squarespace SEO Checklist: 2023 Update

Hi @charlestonnikki Semrush is one of the primary tools I use with my clients (a mix of Squarespace and WordPress sites). I'd be happy to chat: ed@bluehillsdigital.com - Ed -- Blue Hills Digital Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works. Resource: Squarespace SEO Checklist: 2023 Update

Hi – I'd be happy to do some troubleshooting on a call if that would be helpful. We would need to look at the new Squarespace dashboard, Google Search Console properties for both domains, and the DNS records or both domains. I'm sure you want to get on top of it quickly, ideally before Google re-indexes the site! You can use this scheduling link for booking: https://calendly.com/blue-hills-digital/website-support-video-call - Ed -- Blue Hills Digital Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works. Latest resource: Google Analytics 4 vs. Universal Analytics: Getting Started with GA4

Squarespace 7.0 templates didn't all behave the same with h1 tagging, so perhaps your client's site is using a different template to the site mentioned earlier in the thread. I totally agree it's not ideal that the templates were coded this way. They seem to have corrected this in 7.1, where the site logo/title are no longer wrapped in h1 tags. Unfortunately I'm not aware of a way to strip the h1 tags from the logo on a 7.0 site.

Hi @rastaquere17 - unfortunately Squarespace does not have a built-in import or migration route from SS 7 to 7.1. If you want to upgrade from SS 7 to 7.1 you'll need to manage the migration yourself (or hire someone to do it for you). We've put together a guide to migrating from Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1 which outlines the process and includes links to some third-party tools that can help speed up the process and reduce the risk of hurting SEO if your 7.0 site is already established. Hope that helps some. Ed -- Blue Hills Digital Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works. Latest resource: Google Analytics 4 vs. Universal Analytics: Getting Started with GA4

Hi @NeuroScienceOf – I'd need to talk more about you're bigger picture goals about the two websites and which one becomes the long-term, authoritative domain for that content before making a recommendation about how to proceed. One note: there isn't any easy way to add canonical tags to individual Squarespace blog posts. The canonical tag should go in the header, and there is not post-specific header code injection for SS blog posts. I'd be happy to find time for a quick chat if you want. Here's a scheduling link. - Ed -- Blue Hills Digital Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works. Latest resource: Google Analytics 4 vs. Universal Analytics: Getting Started with GA4

@BANE You can verify right from the Squarespace Analytics tool – see screenshot below. Alternatively follow the Google Search Console instructions to create a TXT record to your DNS using the value provided. There are some notes and more screenshots here: https://www.bluehillsdigital.com/articles/google-search-console-add-verify-website/

@Cbreeze @BANE can you share your domains? That makes troubleshooting easier. Ed -- Blue Hills Digital Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works. Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services

Hi @KimberleyDoyle - make sure you're pasting the GA4 measurement ID into the relevant External APIs field in your Squarespace site. It's easy to get confused between that and the Property ID, Data Stream ID etc in the GA4 settings. This article has some screenshots that should help: https://www.bluehillsdigital.com/articles/squarespace-google-analytics/#add-ga4-squarespace Hope that helps. - Ed -- Blue Hills Digital Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works. Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services

There's no way to definitively control what text Google displays as the title and description in the search results. The amount of title and description re-writing Google is doing increased dramatically in the past year. You can read about these changes in more detail in this article: https://searchengineland.com/navigating-googles-title-changes-the-rollout-whats-happening-now-and-what-you-can-do-about-it-375445 It's possible Google will decide to adjust the title and description displayed in the SERPs for your homepage over time, but maybe it won't 🤪 Ultimately your best bet is to do you best to write a good SEO title and description for each page/post in the Squarespace SEO settings – something that you think will work for the most popular search query intent for that you're targeting with that URL – and hope Google uses it. Hope that helps, - Ed -- Blue Hills Digital Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works. Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services

Hi @JustinR - I just tested and it looks like this is still an issue. Have you reached out to Squarespace support? It's hard to suggest other potential issues without checking the website itself and what you're seeing in Google Search Console. - Ed -- Blue Hills Digital Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works. Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services

Hi @LauraStoker - there isn't a URL to the pop-up itself .. if I'm understanding correctly what you're looking to achieve I think you're best bet is to create a separate landing page with the popup content replicated. You could set that page to no-index so it's not crawled in search results and you could use that URL to drive traffic directly to the sign up form. Make sense? Website looks great. Love the color palette. Ed -- Blue Hills Digital Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works. Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services

You have to hover your mouse over a page in the list to see the gear icon – is it still not showing when you mouseover one of the pages? - Ed -- Blue Hills Digital Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works. Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services

Hi @TheBrattleboro - the additional "Sitelinks" that display below the main result are selected by Google based on what the algorithm thinks will be useful for a particular user's search term. This means that the set of sitelinks shown for your site may vary from one search to another depending on the search query the user entered. There's no way to directly control whether sitelinks are displayed, or what sitelinks are displayed. Generally having a clean, simple site architecture and navigation structure will help, but ultimately the algorithm will decide what to include. See more info from Google Search Central here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearance/sitelinks Hope that helps, - Ed -- Blue Hills Digital Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works. Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services