edharris
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Posts posted by edharris
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Hi - I think this error may be related to how the Ahrefs site verification tag is added to the website. It looks like you used the HTML tag method (out of the choice of verification methods listed here) but accidentally pasted in more code than you should have. When implemented correctly, you should be adding a code snippet that looks like the screenshot below into the Header section of the Settings > Advanced > Code Injection menu:
Let me know if you need more help figuring it out 🙂
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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On 4/3/2022 at 6:16 AM, Knave_girl said:
I have had an email from Google search console this morning - which is progress - never had one before. Unfortunately it identifies that I have Coverage Issues and says the following errors are found on your site:
Redirect error
From the table marked Details in the GSC screenshot it looks like you already started validating a fix to that error?
I ran a quick crawl of the site and the only error I see is on this URL: https://www.profane.co.uk/shop/mothers-day maybe check what's happening there?
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Hi @Knave_girl - for issue number one, it looks like your domain is pointing to your website successfully. If you want to double check, when you look at the DNS records for your domain in GoDaddy, you should see 4 A records pointing to the IP addresses Squarespace specifies, a CNAME for www that points to ext-sq.squarespace.com, and another CNAME for a random string specific to your site that points to verify.squarespace.com. When you connected your third party domain, Squarespace will have added those records automatically when you authenticated your GoDaddy account, so it's unlikely there's anything more you need to do there so long as the Squarespace > Settings > Domain menu shows the domain as "Connected".
For the second issue – getting Google to index the site – that can take much longer. First Google has to "discover" the site, then get around to "crawling" it, and only then will it potentially decide to "index" some of the pages if it finds quality content. Once some pages on the site are indexed, they can potentially be shown in search results.
The best things you can do to move this process along are:
- Verify your domain with Google Search Console
- Add your Squarespace sitemap in GSC
- Use the Request Indexing feature to politely ask Google to pay attention to the site 🙂
- See if you can get some quality inbound links to the site from other websites that are already indexed by Google. Don't pay for spammy, low-quality links though!
Then you just have to wait ... it can take a while for Google to index a new site.
Hope that helps,
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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Ah I see what you mean. Sorry - I see how my earlier response doesn't solve the problem.
As best I can tell this is a platform-level problem with Squarespace 7.1 – the automatically generated titles on the Shop and Product Category pages are all rendered in <h2> tags instead of <h1>.
You could reach out to Squarespace Support to see if they can suggest a workaround...
Alternatively, if SS support can't help and you want more control over the category pages you could create them manually as regular pages and then populate the product listing using summary blocks. That way you could create the appropriate page structure. You would have to create URL redirects from each of the system-generated category archive pages to your custom ones, and set the system-generated category pages to noindex.
Convoluted, but I'm not aware of another way to get around that.
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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Hi @lukewrb9 I think your best bet is to add a section above the category archive display, and then you can add a h1 heading (and perhaps some introductory text as well, which will never hurt for SEO purposes). Then you can turn off or hide the h2 category title the comes with the default page layout.
Hope that helps,
Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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Hi Carole – honestly I don't think you have much to worry about here. You've already done a good job compressing your images and limiting how many fonts you're loading .... most of the remaining performance-related issues are things you can't control. As a fully-hosted platform, Squarespace doesn't let us individual users work to improve things like caching and how efficiently external resources are loaded. I think of it as part of the trade-off for being on a more fully-managed platform, in comparison to Wordpress where you can improve those things but you also have to manage security and updates in a much more active way.
If you're looking for further website improvements at this point I'd focus on content and SEO over trying to squeeze more technical improvements out of Squarespace 🙂
Hope that helps,
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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There will always be some discrepancy between Squarespace Analytics and Google Analytics, since they use different methodologies for counting (and excluding) the various different metrics.
The big different in the screenshots you shared is that the Squarespace one is reporting on "Visits", which is analogous to "Sessions" in Google Analytics. The GA screenshot you shared shows Users, not Sessions, so that's why there's such a big difference. Above the graph in the GA screenshot there's a dropdown menu currently set to "Users". Switch that to "Sessions" and you'll likely see some numbers that are closer to the Squarespace numbers.
Hope that helps!
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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I'm not 100% clear what you mean by "standard" and "integrated"
20 hours ago, roattw said:"Note, you would not use both the built-in integration and code injection methods at the same time. "
What Squarespace is saying here is that you should EITHER paste your GA tracking/measurement IDs in the Settings > Advanced > External APIs field OR implement GA tracking yourself via code injection, but not both.
If you want to implement GA tracking via code injection, just delete any IDs you have in the Settings > Advanced > External APIs field and click Save. Then you are good to use gtag or GA via GTM in code injection.
Hope that helps!
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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Hi Mikayla - those URLs are blocked from crawling deliberately by Squarespace. You can see the rules that block them in the robots.txt file generated by Squarespace for your site: https://steffantp.com.au/robots.txt
It looks like most of these are just preventing Google's crawlers from wasting time on the archive pages associated with authors and collection items.
Unless you really want those pages to be crawled (and then potentially indexed) by Google then you can safely ignore these issues in Semrush 🙂
Hope that helps!
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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Those two screenshots you shared look good to me - that's what you would want to see.
The first one shows Google has not only discovered and crawled, but actually indexed the correct version of your homepage URL: https://www.pacificestimating.com.au/
The second screenshot is for the insecure http version of the homepage, so you don't want Google to index that URL. Just make sure that if a user hits the http version they are redirected to the https version successfully. If not, make sure "secure" and "HSTS secure" are toggled on in Squarespace > Settings > Advanced > SSL.
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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If you only want to enable this on certain pages I think your best bet would be to turn off the Pinterest Save button functionality that's built in to Squarespace and then add the code manually, only on the specific pages where you want it.
You can use Pinterest's "Widget Builder" to generate the code - I'm guessing you would pick the "On Hover" option. Then once it's set up you can grab the code and use code injection to add it either to specific pages or to your blog collection items, etc.
Hope that helps,
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: How to Transfer from Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1: Complete Guide
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Hi - I took a look at the source code for your homepage and it looks like this image is currently set as the featured image when that URL is shared on social: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/55224f22e4b0ae29d9f22417/t/621b41431f614850080b678a/1645953347662/studiodevon2.jpg?format=1500w
Is that what you intended or are you trying to change that image?
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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Hi Nikki - you did the right thing by claiming the domain on Google Search Console and adding the sitemap. If this is a new (or newly refreshed) site, you probably just need to wait now for Google to get around to re-crawling the site and determining what pages to index.
You could use the "Request Indexing" feature in Search Console to submit a request for them to re-index the homepage. It doesn't guarantee it will happen within any particular timeframe but that's the only tool Google makes available to notify them when a new URL is published or when a URL has changed so much it deserves to be re-crawled.
Outside of Search Console, work on building some quality (not paid) external links to your website from other sites. If Google notices links to your site from other sites that it is already regularly crawling that may help too.
Good luck!
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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Hi @kylescully27 - what date did you connect the custom domain to your Squarespace account and publish your website?
If you connected the domain and published recently (like in the last few days) then the results you're seeing in Search Console are just outdated and will change the next time Googles bots crawl your site. You can see in the second screenshot you shared that the two variations of the homepage URL were last crawled on Feb 9 and Feb 16.
You can help the process along by uploading your sitemap to Search Console and using the Request Indexing feature to nudge Google to recrawl the homepage if there have been changes since the Feb 16 crawl.
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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Hi Jamie,
Can you share an example of a product URL that you're experiencing these issues with? I just ran one item through the Pinterest Rich Pin debugging tool and it seemed to validate just fine (including price, currency, etc)
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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Hi – I suspect these product URLs might be getting blocked because they are in the .../search-all/... directory, and .../search is blocked by default in the Squarespace robots.txt file. Obviously the intention there is to block indexing of URLs generated by the built-in website search functionality, but I suspect your products are getting caught up in that too.
I'm not aware of a way to modify the robots.txt file contents on Squarespace, so if that was the case and it's important for your business to have these product URLs indexed by Google, you might need to adjust your URL structure. If you need support there, let me know.
Hope that helps!
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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The easiest way to do this is to set up that pageview as a conversion event in Google Analytics. Once that's done, you can import that conversion event from GA into Google Ads, and then reference it in any campaign that is optimized for conversions.
The mechanism for doing that depends on whether you're using GA3 (Universal Analytics) or GA4. Happy to help more if you need it.
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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@Marc22 - looks like your homepage is indexed and being included in Google search results now - see screenshot attached.
Helping Google understand your site and when it will be helpful to show your URLs in search result pages can take time. Keep creating and sharing valuable, quality content that you know resonates with your local audience, and Google will pay attention in time.
Good luck!
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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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
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. But there's a good chance it won't 🤪
Hope that helps,
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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I'm not seeing that on the front end, but on inspecting the code it looks like perhaps there was an error with attempting to comment out the text that you're seeing.
HTML comment syntax should look like this:
<!-- Comments go here -->You also don't need to have these verification lines of code loading on every page of the site – you already have Google Tag Manager installed so you should be able to handle Google verification that way, and once you're verified in Google Search Console you can use the Bing Webmaster Tools integration to pull in your verified GSC properties.
Hope that helps!
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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Are the unusual bounce rates being reported in Squarespace Analytics or Google Analytics? Can you narrow it down to specific pages or specific traffic sources?
Sometimes sites will get hit by some unusual spam traffic source that results in a spike of website sessions with 0 time on site and 100% bounce rate. If that's what's happening there's not much to do besides build a filter or segment in Google Analytics to clean that data out of your reporting.
Happy to take a look at your analytics with you if you need a consult.
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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The status you described in the coverage report captures URLs that Google is aware of but haven't been crawled or indexed (yet). It doesn't mean they won't be crawled and potentially indexed – it may just mean Google hasn't got to them yet. This may be the case if it's a brand new site.
You can find more detailed information about what these status messages mean here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203?hl=en#zippy=
I've found that setting up and verifying ownership of a Google Business Profile can help get a new site "noticed" by Google. Could give that a try too, while you're waiting for the site to get crawled.
Hope that helps,
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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On 2/1/2022 at 8:53 PM, hasher22 said:
Edit: It seems google found my individual blog links and put them in the category "Discovered – currently not indexed". Hmmmmm
That's good that those individual blog URLs are "discovered" now. Next step is for them to be crawled, and then potentially indexed and ranked. Outside of the actions I suggested in my earlier comment there's not much else you can do to speed this process up – just make sure the quality of the content is good and keep up the focus on internal linking on the site!
You can "request indexing" for each individual URL (but don't submit more than once for each one). It may not necessarily make any difference in the speed that they are prioritized though.
– Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
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As far as I know, Squarespace doesn't provide a way to manually add canonical tags to individual blog posts.
In this instance, I'm not sure I'd recommend doing that anyway — if one of your blog posts is ranking well for a search query that's important for your business, I'd take advantage of that existing ranking and focus on trying to optimize the user experience for users that land on that blog post. Look for opportunities to place additional calls to action on that post to encourage more users to convert.
– Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
Google Console sitemap couldn't fetch
in SEO
Posted
Just confirming - is this the URL you've entered in the Sitemaps section of your Google Search Console property? https://www.herocards.us/sitemap.xml
- Ed
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Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.
Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services