Significant SEO Issues with 7.1 Blogs - Indexation and SERP Impressions

I would love to get feedback from the community on an issue I am seeing.

Yesterday, out of frustration on getting some blog pages indexed on one of my 7.1 client websites, I dug a bit deeper. I noticed that I am seeing a significantly lower indexation rate and search results for blog pages built in 7.1 versus 7.0. The normal website pages appear to be fine, but the blog page performance is much different.

I decided to make a comparison to see if I could spot an overall trend. I manage about 15 different SQSP client sites, but I would only say that 8 of those put enough effort into blogging to make a decent comparison. Five of those eight sites are in 7.0, and three are in 7.1.

I compared the total number of blog posts in SQSP versus the total number of those blog posts indexed by Google and the total number of blog posts that actually get some traffic in a Google SERP (via Google Search Console).

The three 7.1 websites have a total of 69 blog posts among them, and only 36% of their blogs are indexed, and only 17% show up in the SERPs, according to GSC.

The five 7.0 websites have a total of 402 blog posts among them, 98.5% of them are indexed, and 96.5% of them show up in the SERPs, according to GSC.

I realize that the quality of pages is a big factor in terms of whether a page is indexed and receives impressions. However, the vast majority of the 7.1 posts are of equal quality to the 7.0 posts. I've also optimized them the same way.

The other interesting thing is that the normal pages are fine — It's only the blogs doing this. I see the 7.1 pages fully indexed and receiving normal impression rates. I see some 7.1 pages getting impressions for hundreds of queries, and then the blog posts get impressions for only 1 or 2. 

I consider myself to be a fairly experienced SEO guy - I've been doing this for about 15 years and at least eight on Squarespace. So I've seen enough that I feel like I am grasping the data correctly here.

Does anyone else out there who does SEO regularly for Squarespace clients who have clients on both platforms have any similar data to share?

One theory I have is that Fluid Engine might be causing some issues with Google's rendering. I've seen other CMS platforms like ShowIt and Pixieset (I do a fair amount of photography website SEO) suffer SEO-wise due to what I suspect is their layout engine and the way javascript serves their page. I know Google is supposed to be able to handle Javascript fairly well, but it is an unmistakable difference compared to Squarespace 7.0 and WordPress websites. 

But that theory doesn't fully explain the 7.1 normal pages doing well...unless the majority of these were created in the traditional editor before Fluid Engine was available.

Missing here is the date column on those websites and post indexing. Google has, over the past 18 months been setting the bar even higher for indexing.

@GlynMusica Yeah, there is a lot of additional data that would be needed to make a definitive evaluation as to the "why." All of this data was gathered, updated, and refreshed a few hours right before my post on January 5th. All of these websites are ones I'm intimately acquainted with, having worked on them for a minimum of a year and, in one case, as long as five years. Some of these examples blog once a week, and others every two months. But I felt they were similar enough in terms of quality and the amount of SEO time I put into them that the major difference was the version of Squarespace.

Without a doubt, Google is becoming more particular about what they index. And I'm glad about that. Searchers don't need 18 million results for a search; they just need the best ones that answer their query.

Again, this was more or less a call for anecdotal evidence from the community to ask if they were seeing anything similar. What I was seeing was so drastic I was looking for some basic correlation before continuing my investigation.

Hi @modsquare - I'd be interested in chatting to you about this as I'm currently setting up my own Squarespace data project.

Feel free to connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-purchase/ or hp@roughwatermedia.com