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Google not indexing homepage

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

Hey I'm wondering if this is an issue that I can fix within Squarespace?

I recently switched a client over from 7.0 to 7.1 and rebuilt her website with a few changes to the way it was organized and with a bunch of new content. We connected the old domain to the new site and canceled the old site. When I initially resubmitted the sitemap for the new site and requested indexing on all important pages, there was no issue and her ranking was excellent - showing up 1st in google search results. Now, her home page is not being indexed at all because of a soft 404 issue -- all other pages are being indexed with the exception of https://www.leighsuggs.com/ and https://www.leighsuggs.com/home -- both of which are active links as far as I can tell. And incidentally -- these are the most important pages to be indexed! 

I submitted a help request to google and their response was that the URL doesn't exist? Help. I've tried removing the home page as the page that people get directed to when there is a 404 message (to catch the old random links from her old site that may exist on various institutions websites) and that didn't help so I turned that back on. 

Anytime I request indexing within google search console it thinks for a little while and then says "Oops! something went wrong!" I've tried over and over again for the past week with no results. 

Attached is a screenshot of what it looks like within console. 

Anyone else run into this problem? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.  

Cami

 

 

Screen Shot 2022-03-31 at 12.44.48 PM.png

Screen Shot 2022-03-31 at 12.45.14 PM.png

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  • Solution
18 hours ago, cami_leisk said:

Her home page is not being indexed at all because of a soft 404 issue -- all other pages are being indexed

As a first step, I suggest adding some relevant text-based content to the homepage and then request reindexing. I say this because the homepage doesn't contain any useful text content that can be indexed - at least none that I could see. Here's what I saw when I viewed the homepage:

site-homepage-content.thumb.png.37332cec96945670ac348de825c79da9.png

Google wants to provide users with the best "answer" to their search "question" so, for the homepage to be indexed and considered valuable, it must contain useful information on the topic you want to rank for. As a minimum, Google has to know what the page is about, otherwise it will be considered "thin content". 

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