it's been months; main page still not indexed (but blog post is)

Site URL: https://getcontentforhumans.com

Hey all,

I launched getcontentforhumans.com months ago and have done all the obvious things (Google Search Console, Google Analytics, requesting site to be indexed) but am still not showing up. The lone blog post I've published thus far is indexed, but the main site is not, according to GSC and a simple site:getcontentforhumans.com lookup.

IRL colleagues have suggested various fixes, like editing the sitemap or adding rel canonical tags to /home, which duplicates the main / url. Obviously Squarespace doesn't let me do either of these things.

I really need to get to a place where googling my business name / my name / even my domain will, you know, surface my site. Anyone care to take a look and tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks!

I have just edited the slug of /home (which was just...the main page) to be simply / . If that was the problem, then Google will eventually index me properly I guess? But I don't know if that was the problem. Any advice?

Hey ... Humans 🙂   Love the "content for humans" framing.

I just ran a quick crawl of the site and there are a few minor errors to fix, but nothing that would be preventing Google from discovering/crawling/indexing the site. Unfortunately that often just takes time for a brand new site – especially one with very few URLs like yours.

Building the business' profile off-site will help – if you're eligible for a Google Business Profile, set one up. If you have social profiles for the business, link to the website from those profiles, and back to those profiles from the website. If you have other opportunities to to build *real, quality, natural* links to your website from other established sites, do that. And in the meantime, publish more blog posts and focus on building up internal linking.

Happy to jump on a call and look at your Search Console with you if you want, and share the crawl results.

- 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

Cant' see that you say you have added the sitemap to Google Search Console. That should be done.

Then I would look at how your website scores against Core Web Vitals.

Then I would look to build some links.

Note the following: Google is no longer indexing like it used to. We've have gone past the point of search engines needing websites and now the strategy is to put obstacles in front of websites so indexing and visibility comes via one of the search engines paid advertising solutions. I can recommend that you get external links to your homepage and this does, for the moment, mean you will accelerate your indexing. I will say that to have this kind of indexing delay off a new domain is peculiar. I might look and see whether the domain name has a history of being used for activities that were spammy in the past because frankly it should be indexed.

You got a link from this forum post, so that might even be enough.

Good luck.

Thanks to both of you. I added sitemap months ago as well. Haven't investigated Core Web Vitals nor Google Business, but I will once I clear out some client work.

Just made a few tweaks at the advice of a "Squarespace SEO expert" (...) like adding an H1 (duh, oops) to main page and moving "about" and "contact" to distinct pages rather than on-page links. I'm not sure I buy that the latter is needed, but it wasn't a difficult change to make.

Was this a paid consultation with an SEO? There are very basic elements that haven't been addressed on the site. I offer short trainings via Zoom if needed. As a content writer, you'll want to understand SEO fundamentals. Good luck! 

it was not, and her advice wasn't particularly convincing, so I'm not planning to engage her paid services.

Yeah, I'd like to think I have a good handle on SEO writing principles- but there's plenty I don't know about technical SEO and actually building websites. That's always been someone else's job.

I also haven't been motivated to invest more time into it until the main page is indexed. Doing SEO stuff on a site no one can find...seems a waste.

Again, I'm sure there are lots of things I should start doing eventually--but what I want to figure out first is why random subpages are indexed and the main page isn't, after months of trying and waiting.

Update: my main page is finally indexed. I have no idea which of the 17 things I tweaked did the trick, or this forum link, or who knows. 

Still no idea why it says "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" when the sitemap is definitely submitted (and Squarespace won't let me edit the sitemap, so completely out of my control). Ah well.

Site URL: https://resistile.com

Hi, I'm new to Squarespace and after 5 months of the website creation we are still not indexed by Google. Inspection tool shows no errors and URL's are available for indexing but still we are not indexed. See some screenshots attached. Anyone have any advice on what could be the problem?

I have exactly the same problem with my main page in resistile.com..."Indexed, not submitted in sitemap", and the sitemap is definitely submitted. I think this is a SS problem but just don't know how to solve it. I did notice though that in the sitemap the main page URL ends with /home and the indexed URL has no /home at the end. Not sure if that could be the problem?

Regards

Nevan