Site not indexing and potential homepage slug issue

Site URL: https://www.joshuapearl.com/

Squarespace requires a slug for all pages, including the homepage. However, I will be using www.mysite.com to promote my site, NOT www.mysite.com/home.

Questions:

1. Is there going to be a duplicate content issue between www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com/home?

2. Is Google going to understand my site structure when the sitemap doesn't feature the clean URL (www.mysite.com) anywhere, and the sitemap cannot be manually changed? 

I've submitted the site in search console but indexing is taking longer than I'm used to, so I'm growing concerned. It's been 2 weeks since I created the Search Console account, submitted sitemap, and requested indexing, yet none of the pages have been indexed yet.

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

@edharris Thanks so much for your reply! Super helpful. I think I can take it from here.

Hi - I am actually having an issue where my domain is not automatically redirecting to the/home slug. If you enter glassninjas.com you get an underconstruction notice but if you put in glassnijas.com/home it works. I have made sure this page is identified as the homepage within the page setting. Please advise.

@orourkedevon

Yes, you can visit: https://www.glassninjas.com/home -- although Squarespace add a canonical tag -- you can find it by viewing source -- then you will see: