edharris
-
Posts
151 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Forums
Gallery
Blogs
Events
Store
Downloads
Profiles
Posts posted by edharris
-
-
Hi @Matt3dot0 - these are called "Sitelinks" - they're generated automatically 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.
You can customize the SEO title and SEO description fields on pages on your site to encourage Google to use that copy in the sitelink titles and descriptions – this might be a good idea particularly for your description text on the four pages currently being shown as sitelinks.
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
-
Hi @hasher22 - I think what your Ahrefs screenshot shows is actually just that the page that shows blog posts filtered by author is blocked from search results, not the blog posts themselves. The URL listed in the "Target URL" column in the Ahrefs report is the one that is being reported as blocked in the robots.txt file, not the blog posts themselves.
However if you want to double check the contents of the robots.txt file you can use Google's Robots Testing Tool to view the contents of the file: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/robots-testing-tool You will need to have your domain set up as a verified property in Google Search Console to use the tool.
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
-
At a quick glance it looks like you have the 4 A records and 1 CNAME record in there needed to point web traffic to Squarespace, and I don't see any other records in there that would interfere with that. How long have you waited after changing the records for the verification process? It can take around 24 hours (and technically up to 72) for the records to propogate.
Definitely don't touch the MX records - those are what point traffic to your client's mail servers!
- Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
-
That's annoying. Google started rewriting SERP titles very aggressively during last year - see an explanation here, and (largely useless) docs from Google here.
Your title tag on the page is
<title>Home-Lloyd Birch Property & Landscape Photography</title>
so that *should* be good. You might want to remove the "Home-" from the beginning of it?
Otherwise I'd focus on doing other things to encourage Google's crawlers to recrawl the page and hopefully it will get it right on the second pass.
Couple of suggestions:
- Find a way to add the same (or similar) text in an <h1> tag in the page itself? Perhaps a headline under the drone footage before the intro text? Google might be getting thrown off by there being no heading 1 tag on the homepage.
- Get set up in Google Search Console if you haven't already – upload your sitemap, and submit the homepage URL for reindexing.
The drone footage looks awesome 🙂
- Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
-
Hi @HTechnical - Squarespace is configured in a way that any traffic hitting mysite.com/home will be redirected to the root domain: mysite.com and that shouldn't cause any problems.
If you've already created the domain property with Google Search Console and added the sitemap you've taken all the right steps ... now you just have to wait for Google to decide to crawl the site.
Anything you can do to drive traffic to the site or building links to the site from other websites can help speed this up. Encourage the website owner to link to the homepage from their other professional profiles – LinkedIn, author profile pages with publishers, etc.
One other note - it looks like there was a previous website at the same domain that accrued a couple of backlinks. It might be worth setting up redirects that correspond to those old links. LMK if you need help finding those.
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
-
I think including "Richard Salter Music" in the image alt tags is unlikely to make a big difference in your search ranking. I think it's unlikely to provide any benefit, since it's clear to Google's crawlers that the website is all about "Richard Salter Music"! As you add more images, I'd advise sticking to a clear accurate description of the image itself.
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
-
Hi Richard,
The site looks good – I like the aesthetic 🙂
Here's a short answer to your question about keyword stuffing and alt text for images: the alt text for each image should be a quick description of what's in the image – something that would help explain the image to someone using a screenreader to view your website. So using identical, non-descriptive alt text on all of your images is not the right approach. Better to use the alt text to describe what the images capture (e.g. movie or tv show titles, etc.)
For your site's rankings in Google overall, finding the right strategy depends a lot on your goals for the website. It sounds like your primary goal is simply to show up in searches for your name + relevant industry terms, which means you need to teach Google who you are and how you are different from other Richard Salters on the internet. You can achieve some of this with on-page SEO tweaks to your website, but you'll want to integrate that with some off-page SEO tactics as well to build up your presence in the search results page for the keywords you want to rank for.
I also noticed your site is built as a single page site, with anchor links for each section. It can often be harder to rank a single page site, particularly when there is enough content on the site to spread the sections out into separate pages.
If you're interested, I'd be happy to talk about some of these options in more detail. There's info about SEO consult services here.
Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
-
No problem. On Squarespace 7.0, you can turn on/off the button as one of the options included in the Events Page listing - see this support article (just make sure you're looking at the 7.0 tab, not 7.1).
Good luck!
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
-
Hi @JAM3763 - unfortunately there isn't an easy way to do this – even if you hide the button from the Event Page, each Event Title and Event Image will still link to each individual event listing. You could set up a 301 redirect for every single individual event URL that would redirect users from the event to the external URL, but that feels hacky and likely difficult to maintain over time.
Curious to see if others have better suggestions. Noting it's a Squarespace 7.0 site, since that means the Event Page options are a little different.
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services
-
Options are limited on Squarespace 7.0 rather than 7.1. Have you considered using the Promotional Pop-up functionality to make sure the Donate CTA is in front of mobile users? You could hide it above the mobile breakpoint using CSS...
If you were on 7.1, the mobile header menu layout options accommodate a button in addition to the hamburger menu – worth bearing in mind if you were thinking of jumping from 7.0 to 7.1.
- Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace and Google Analytics: a Step-by-Step Guide
-
Hi @hilaryb - lots of different ways to approach this with varying degrees of complexity. Based on what you described, the most simple and flexible solution might be adding a sharing "plugin" like AddToAny. What gets displayed on your site can be heavily customized, but a common option is to have the page URL and title be the "shared" content and I know the list of sharing platforms can be tailored to include email and SMS, in addition to a bunch of other common messaging apps. More info here: https://www.addtoany.com/buttons/customize/page_url_title
You would need to be on a Squarespace Business plan or higher to use this.
If you need support getting this up and running, or want to talk through the functionality you're looking for more detail feel free to reach out. There's contact info and call scheduling here.
Hope that helps,
Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace and Google Analytics: a Step-by-Step Guide
-
Hi @JanaK - congrats on the new website. Changing domains and maintaining search rankings/visibility is definitely tricky so I understand the confusion.
Based on the info you shared and taking a quick look at the two sites, I think linking the old domain to the new site as a secondary domain is smart. You have a decent number of backlinks out there on the internet pointing to meetra-garmany.com URLs, and the best way to keep that traffic (and nudge Google to update the rankings) is to link meetra-germany.com as a secondary domain and then either ensure there are pages on the new site with the same URL slug as before, OR use the URL mapping tools to set up some 301 redirects.
There are several other strategies you can pursue here as well, including using Google's "Change of Address" tool to notify the search engine that the website has moved to an entirely new domain. If you'd like, we can get on a call to review some of these steps together - there's a link on this page to book a free consult if you're interested.
Hope that helps,
Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Squarespace and Google Analytics: a Step-by-Step Guide
-
Hi Ken – I'd be happy to hop on a quick call with you and see if we would be a good fit. I offer a range of services, from coaching/training through to done-for-you services focused on SEO and search visibility.
There's a scheduling link for a free consult on this page.
Looking forward to connecting if this is of interest.
- Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Website Audit Checklist for 2021 [Template and 15-Step Guide]
-
Hi @LaurenWS - confirming, do you have access to this domain property in Google Search Console? If so, take a look at the Coverage report and confirm that the excluded URLs have the status "Excluded by 'noindex' tag"? In this report, you can see the last crawled date for the URLs listed. If it's a while ago, you could request reindexing for those URLs. This doesn't guarantee Google will rush to index them right away, but it's the best you can do.
Hope that helps.
Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Website Audit Checklist for 2021 [Template and 15-Step Guide]
-
Hi - I don't have a good explanation for the result you shared in the screenshot, but the Search Engine Results Page for your brand search query looks good to me:
Hope that helps reassure!
Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Website Audit Checklist for 2021 [Template and 15-Step Guide]
-
Hi Agathe – if your website is very new it can take a while for Google to crawl and index the site. However, there are some steps you can take to make this process easier (and potentially faster).
A great place to start is registering your website domain with Google Search Console and adding the Sitemap URL, which Squarespace generates automatically.
We have a quick video and set of instructions on how to do that here: https://www.bluehillsdigital.com/articles/squarespace-sitemap-google-search-console/
Hope that helps!
Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Website Audit Checklist for 2021 [Template and 15-Step Guide]
-
Hi @MonMoni - for the homepage only, you can adjust this in the field labeled "SEO Title" right below the section shown in your screenshot!
Hope that helps!
- Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Website Audit Checklist for 2021 [Template and 15-Step Guide]
-
Hi Brad - I'd be happy to take a look at this for you. We offer a website audit service – if you're interested check out the details at the link below and get in touch for a quick free consult. We'll get aligned on goals and get you a quote. https://www.bluehillsdigital.com/services/website-audits/
-
Nope ... Squarespace doesn't offer a way to view form submissions. You have to rely on one of the built in storage options – pushing submissions to a Google Sheet is the easiest option.
if you're looking for help with more advanced form implementations on Squarespace let me know 🙂
Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Website Audit Checklist for 2021 [Template and 15-Step Guide]
-
I'd recommend trying to think about this from a website visitor/user perspective. What's the value provided to the user on those pages that don't have internal links but are ranking in search? If they are valuable pages for users, that might be a good argument for incorporating them into the site structure explicitly, with internal links.
Also worth checking the backlink profile for those URLs. If there is incoming traffic to those non-linked pages, that would be another argument for keeping them (or at least gracefully redirecting them if you chose to move that valuable content onto other pages as you redesign the site).
Hope that helps!
Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Website Audit Checklist for 2021 [Template and 15-Step Guide]
-
Hi @RebeccaD - it looks like the share links you selected are displaying – in the Bedford theme they display in a modal window when a user clicks on the "Share" icon. See this screenshot
Some other Squarespace 7.0 template families offer "advanced share buttons" that aren't hidden behind the share link, but not Bedford unfortunately. There are more details on those differences here: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543857-Share-buttons
There are third-party tools that would improve your social sharing buttons – some free but privacy-invasive (e.g. ShareThis), and others paid (e.g. ElfSight) – but these require using code injection and take a bit of additional setup outside your Squarespace account.
Hope that helps!
- Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Website Audit Checklist for 2021 [Template and 15-Step Guide]
-
Hi @gloryj - from the screenshot you shared it looks like maybe you tried to connect a custom domain? Squarespace customer support may be able to provide some assistance there if that's the main problem you're facing.
If you'd like some more direct assistance getting the site launched and getting that initial visibility for your business on Google I'd be happy to see if I can help. I offer potential clients a quick free consult on Zoom so we have a chance to see if working together would be a good fit - I'll ask a few questions to better understand your goals and niche, and then I can share a quote based on what you're looking to achieve. If you'd like a to book a free call you can use this scheduling link to find a time. 🙂
Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Website Audit Checklist for 2021 [Template and 15-Step Guide]
-
Hi @makeithumme - I'm guessing the valid pages are the homepage, resources, features and subscribe right? And the three blog posts are not indexed yet?
If so, first thing to check is the last crawl date (top right of the screenshot you shared, but outside the frame).
Also for a new site, it's not uncommon for new posts to be slow to get indexed. There are a few tricks you can use to try and speed this up.
- Use the Search Console "Request Indexing" feature to request that a specific URL get indexed. No guarantees on timeframe here, but it doesn't hurt to do this when you publish new content.
- Start generating some inbound traffic to the non-indexed URLs from other sources – share the link on social sites, share it in a forum post or two (Reddit, etc...) — while these don't count as official backlinks, sometimes this activity is enough to nudge Google's crawlers to pay attention to the new URLs.
- If you have a Google property (like a Google My Business profile) create a post that links to your non-indexed URL there. I've had success doing this a few times to get a new post to index when it seems to have been missed by the crawlers.
- Generate some actual backlinks from other websites – if you can get others in your niche to link to you that will help too.
Let us know if you see a change!
- Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Website Audit Checklist for 2021 [Template and 15-Step Guide]
-
Hi @MDEZZ - the site is looking good! Hope you're happy with it. I work on SEO for Squarespace sites and would be happy to chat with you and see how I can support. I offer potential clients a quick free consult on Zoom so we have a chance to see if working together would be a good fit - I'll ask a few questions to better understand your goals and niche, and then I can share a quote based on what you're looking to achieve. If you'd like a to book a free call you can use this scheduling link to find a time.
We do also have some DIY guides available, like this one for Squarespace SEO. However I'm guessing the issues you may be facing are specific to establishing search visibility for a brand new site — that's all about getting Google (and other search engines) to understand your new site as the authoritative source of information about your business. That's always a fun challenge, and I'd be happy to help out 🙂
- Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.Latest resource: Website Audit Checklist for 2021 [Template and 15-Step Guide]
My Blogs are blocked from SEO/Robots.txt?
in SEO
Posted
Hard to say without direct Google Search Console access, but I'm not seeing anything that would prevent Google from crawling and potentially indexing the blog URLs. It may just be that the site hasn't been crawled recently, or if it has, the crawl bots didn't "notice" the blog posts.
A few suggestions that might help get the blog posts crawled and indexed in future:
Good luck!
- Ed
--
Blue Hills Digital
Support with website optimization, SEO and finding a digital marketing strategy that works.
Latest resource: Squarespace SEO Services