SEO and Squarespace? Is this Really an Option?
-
Hi all,
Any feedback on Squarespace, SEO capabilites and ranking factors? I have a client wishing to use the platform and despite the good reviews, which appear to be from resellers by the way, the forums say not.
Although apparently Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz (yes right here!) gave them a big thumbs up “The square space team have put together a remarkable platform, SEO friendliness!
Really not sure here and don’t agree, there are many limitations and hosting with a template provider is always big no no.
Cheers
Virginia -
Hi guys,
Confirming that there is no way to add a custom meta description to Shop pages on square space CMS. Dont understand why these folks dont take suggestions seriously when its negligence is costing its customers huge business!
-
I friggin love u man
-
I discovered a new issue today.
If you're migrating from a site that uses special characters in their URLs (like bigfolio), you can't create individual page-to-page redirects. Squarespace doesn't allow special characters in their redirect syntax and there's no way to create a custom .htaccess file to work around that limitation.
-
I'm having exactly the same issue as you, Jared. Our new site runs on Squarespace, but also utilises two Hubspot sub-domains to host our blog and certain landing pages. The Hubspot pages were indexed without a problem, whereas the Squarespace site just isn't indexing.
-
Thank you, Rand.
-
Yeah - I'd say the inability to customize the titles and meta descriptions is a dealbreaker by itself. That said, it shouldn't be impacting indexing -- could be that Google's crawled those pages but determined they don't have enough unique content, enough link equity, enough positive user/usage signals, or a combination of these, to keep in the main index.
At this point, though, I would probably consider migrating. Wordpress is still my first choice for the customization abilities, but Hubspot's a good one, too.
-
Most of the on-page seo work done by our agency is done through HubSpot. We are not perfect, but we try to implement best practices suggested by Moz and HubSpot. Recently, we have had a few sites designed in Squarespace, and they are subsequently hosted by Squarespace as well. The templates are beautiful and the interface is quite user-friendly. However, we have experienced many of the aforementioned frustrations regarding the customization of the on-page seo. In fact, we are really having serious challenges with Google and indexed pages. We have submitted the sitemap according to the instructions and Google is only indexing 7 of the 72 pages (See attached image for reference). We have submitted the sitemaps of other clients, who are hosted by other platforms (HubSpot, Webflow, etc), and they are not having the same indexing issues that our Squarespace sites are experiencing. Has anyone else experienced this indexing issue with Squarespace? I have contacted Squarespace support, and they have given me the standard "it just takes time" answer. I am wondering if these indexing issues are related to the challenges mentioned in this thread.
Also, I thought we had customized our page titles inside of Squarespace, but I checked back after reading this thread. I see where the website name or name of the business is automatically added to the back end of each page title. I have also attached an image for reference. Is this what you guys are seeing as well?
If this is indeed the case, we will most certainly be migrating our sites over to HubSpot or other platforms that allow for more customized SEO.
Thank you for the helpful feedback. This has cleared up so much for me.
-
Thanks for the heads up Mirabile! Sad to see -- hopefully Squarespace fixes this soon and re-enables fully customizable Title & Meta Descriptions to the other page types.
-
I was prompted to write a response to this article today after helping a friend look into her Squarespace site. It's not like I expected it to have the equivalent of Wordpress' amazing Yoast SEO plugin, but I was at least expecting some nice control over metadata.
However, I discovered users have almost no control over the Title or Meta Description tags on the individual page level.
I even tweeted at SquareSpace support, and they admitted it was not an option yet (at least of 9/2/2016): https://twitter.com/SquarespaceHelp/status/771819238101176320
Right now, you can only add custom titles and descriptions on what Squarespace calls "pages" - but beware, not all pages are created equal. Blog posts are not pages. Neither are e-commerce products. My friend wanted to optimize her product page title tags, but she can't. So disappointing.
Fingers crossed that SquareSpace updates their CMS to maybe allow for this someday....
-
Hi - it certainly looks like there's a number of issues around basic SEO friendliness and accessibility that need addressing on that site, but I'm surprised that SquareSpace's CMS doesn't allow for/enable that. Can you edit the source code on the pages? Or contact their support to look into it?
BTW - I'd also suggest making the homepage title more friendly. Currently, it looks like SEO spam - just keywords jammed together without spaces and without the name of the business. All the page titles have inherited this problem throughout the site.
I might suggest reading https://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization and https://moz.com/blog/on-page-seo-8-principles-whiteboard-friday which contain a lot more detailed information on how to think about keyword targeting and on-page SEO.
-
Hi Rand,
I recently spent two months locked in my study creating my new website in SquareSpace. After a short learning curve, I found it quite user-friendly and created a website that I thought looked very professional and beautiful.
Unfortunately, I lost a lot of my SEO rank when I launched it about two months ago, and I've been trying to figure out what happened ever since. On-page optimization, 301 redirects for old pages, submitting a site map to Google and submitting the site for indexing has made little difference.
Then I found this:
Please check out Google Cache, text-only version for our home page (www.kanataskinclinic.ca) to see what Google sees. Here's what you'll find:
- A LOT of duplicate content. So much it's crazy! Including mutliple title tags.
- Sliders and carousels appear as the same phrase, written over and over again.
- Image file names replaced by generic SS static names.
- alt text that magically appeared out of nowhere, because I didn't put it there. (possibly drawn from the page description?)
What do you think? Could this be killing my SEO?
-
For anyone looking into this, I'd like to offer an update regarding Title Tags and Meta Descriptions. Squarespace has a huge issue in that many of the templates use the title tag and/or meta description to populate content overlaying the main image on a page. As you can imagine this is a HUGE pain in the neck when designing / optimising a site. I'm sure there are workarounds using javascript yet it is still troublesome.
-
Hi,
Thanks for the reply - I have just about managed to convince the client that he should move his website http://www.cssgplc.com/ over to a new platform as I couldn't solve the issues easily for them, and their developers were not interested in finding a solution.
thanks again,
Ben
-
Hey Ben,
No, actually there is no solution to the issues described above. Support is very limited and there is no work-around for these. The only way to change how the platform is working is by editing and customizing the theme yourself, which I have not done for my clients, afraid that the next theme update will ruin it all and make me redo the whole work again.
On the other hand if you have the limitations in mind, and you do not mind complying to those, you can build up a good website on Squarespase, but test the theme seo settings first.
I personally would never use Squarespace as a platform. The designs are great, but WP has so many great designs that can be purchased for little money and you can keep your WP website safe by being careful with plug ins.
I hope this helps,
Biljana
-
Hi Biljana,
I am interested to know if you ever resolved your issues with Squarespace as I had the same problem a few weeks back and couldn't find a solution?
thanks,
Ben
-
Hi Bijana - that's really frustrating and you have my apologies. When I reviewed Squarespace (which, granted, was 18+ months ago now), I didn't encounter that issue, but I also don't remember how deep I dove trying to update Meta Descriptions. I'd say it's definitely worthy of bringing up to their support folks, and for what it's worth, you can tell them I'd strongly endorse/recommend making that change, too.
-
Hi,
It happens that two of my clients are asking me to optimise a sqarespace website at the same time. With the first one I had an issue adding a meta description to the website without impacting the webpage content. Namely the meta description showed up as a hero image content and there was no was to change it, as it was a feature of the theme. So I added the meta description tag in the custom code area, but now I'm facing to have two meta description tags (one is empty) on each page. I did not even get to the posts seo on this client's website.
With the second client I discovered that the only way to add meta description is through the excerpt of the post. No other way. The title is coming form the post title and no way yo add a title different than that.
If this is a sqarespace theme issue, please let me know which one of their themes is without these issues. And Rand here is telling me that it is SEO friendly, It's not, not in these two cases at least. I advised my clients to leave sqarespace and go for WP. At least there are more options to solve seo issues with WP.
-
Hi Virginia - happy to give my $0.02. Basically, on SquareSpace 6 (the active version out now), I think they've done a solid job with SEO features and functionality. I actually consulted a bit (informally - not paid, just helping out because I want folks to provide good SEO, especially popular CMS') with the SquareSpace team, and reviewed some of their implementations. It's good stuff, and SquareSpace is a good company (good customer service, honorable folks, good about refunds, excellent with uptime, etc).
That said, you can certainly get more flexibility by hosting your own system. Wordpress enables a lot of this, especially if you have a good developer making changes to it. Out of the box, SquareSpace is friendlier on many aspects of SEO than Wordpress, but with customizations, the latter can exceed the former.
One last word of advice - be cautious about trusting all the forum chatter, especially the stuff that comes from SquareSpace v6 and earlier (which wasn't very SEO friendly). I don't mean to be a pure advocate/defendent of SquareSpace (and I have no financial or other interest in the company), but do want to be fair to the strides they've made.
Hope that helps!
-
It is a good product and I'm sure they are working to get all the exposure they can, especially from someone who's so well respected in the web world as Rand is. I would be doing the same thing with graces from an individual of his level
-
Thanks for the double confirmation Patrick. I was concerned that Rand had given this product the thumbs up and Squarespace are milking this for all its worth.
-
Thanks for the confirmation Tom. I cant tell you how many clients/friends have wanted SEO help with Wix/Vistaprint/Webs etc.....and then they cant rank the site on Google. I even called up Wix once to be told that Google will just find my site if I have good content and no meta title etc.......not a chance! Thanks for the link.
How do you find ranking parallax sites though? I have been pondering this.
Virginia
-
I second what Tom said on all accounts, Virginia. We've turned down a couple projects for clients wanting to use SquareSpace or helped convince them we could do the same work with a self-hosted WP site using cool parallax features.
Tom, thanks also for the link to ThemeForest. I haven't seen those parallax designs yet, so going to take a peak now!
-
Hi Virginia
Your last point really clinches it for me. Hosting with a template/CMS provider is something I'm really not happy with (especially given the price). I find the CMS and the resulting website very friendly to use and I think it's quite well SEO-optimised, but the limitation of hosting with Squarespace is just counter-productive to me.
If your client really likes Squarespace, there are a number of parallax scrolling Wordpress themes you might be interested in. Here's a selection at Themeforest.
Hope this helps
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO strategy for UK / US websites
Hi, We currently have a UK-focused site on www.palmatin.com ; We're now targeting the North American market as well, but the contents of the site need to be different from UK. One option was to create another domain for the NA market but I assume it would be easier to rank with palmatin.com though. What would you suggest to do, if a company is targeting two different countries in the same language? thanks, jaan
Web Design | | JaanMSonberg0 -
SEO Audit for site redesign
I'm in the process of preparing my company's ecommerce site for a redesign - largely to move to a responsive design and improve issues with UI and some much-needed features. This is a very small ecommerce business (Less than $300K annually), and we have settled on Magento Community Edition for our platform. We understand it to be very "SEO" friendly, and its similar to our current platform - it gives us a lot of flexibility in design, and it appears scalable. While I am aware of our current sites shortcomings (from an SEO standpoint), I was wondering if I should employ an SEO person/company to do a pre/post redesign audit. I looked at the MOZ checklist, and ran my site through Hubspot and WooRanks free tools, and am aware of what they are reporting as SEO items to be fixed. As I am so small, I was wondering if an SEO audit in addition to what I already know might be overkill? Any thoughts/suggestions are welcome.
Web Design | | Artfx1 -
Adobe "Muse" on SEO?
Anyone ever had any experience with this tool? Any feedback on how adobe muse does with SEO and markup is appreciated! update 1: Really? nobody has any comment on this?
Web Design | | Raydon0 -
The Best Wordpress Templates and The Best SEO Plugins??
Hey guys, I am a newbie and after so many painstaking hours of building my new site using the WIX platform, I just found out that WIX is not SEO friendly 😞 So referring to (copy n pasted) the old post below posted in by Big Bazza back in June 2011, does anyone agree or have any updated information they can assist me with so I can get my new site started ? Cheers 🙂 www.studiopress.com - excellent templates and support is first class! EDIT: These all support WP 3.0 and are SEO friendly too! (They have modified the SEO functionality) However, the framework also allows you to run Yoast Wordpress SEO - which is generally considered the best SEO plugin for WP. http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
Web Design | | Giorgio680 -
To many scripts in my homepage. This is a problem in SEO?
I adding a lot of new features to my website: JS animated, menus, google translate, alexa counter, google analytics, salesforce, and so on. My website is full of scripts and im worry about the SEO. Is that an issue?
Web Design | | Naghirniac0 -
Looking for an open source or wordpress designer that knows seo best practices
I have almost lost my patience in trying to find a web developer for our project. I have searched high and low from freelancers to us based firms. All I can find; freelancers that can't get the job done, but promise they can and us based firms that are currently getting away with murder charging through the nose on work that is not acceptable to say the least. US based Firms 1. Seem to give you as little work as possible to increase their margin. I get it we all need to make money. 2. Everyone knows how to do everything until you start telling them that you have a little education in the industry and will be testing their work. All of the sudden they no longer talk to you. 3. Got a few recommendations and they are all subpar performers. After asking them why their builds load so slow or have so many errors they have excuses that point to the customer Freelancers over seas. 1. I am not sure where to start with this. I have searched high and low in freelancer for someone that I can trust to build a site. Of course there is a ton of junk to look through. After countless hours of narrowing down the individuals I am thinking of giving a shot I find that they are not capable of the job. All I want is a new website from a firm that is honest and knows what they are doing. That is educated in seo best practices. That can build a quality website and actually has references of sites they built that are still up and running and test out alright. It is pretty bad when web development companies miss simple items like h tags. Really? Does anyone know of someone that knows what they are doing? That can work with someone that knows how to run a dvd player. Just disappointing to see all these web companies and freelancers that get away with murder. Who earns their keep in this industry?!?!?!?
Web Design | | forecastedinvestments0 -
Which ecommerce platform is best for SEO?
We currently run our eyewear store on osCommerce. However, for various reasons we are considering a redevelopment onto another platform, the most obvious choice being Magento. What might the advantage and improvement in SEO with such a change and is the pain worth the gain???
Web Design | | seanmccauley0 -
Old SEO keyword "articles", are they hurting rankings?
Hello, About two years ago, the company I work for hired an SEO firm to improve organic rankings on our site. The SEO company's primary method for doing this was producing "articles" that are not really articles but keyword stuffed pages with lots of hidden, internal links to other legitimate pages on our site. Examples: http://www.creamright.com/Isi-Chargers-articles.html http://www.creamright.com/How-To-Make-Whipped-Cream-article.html http://www.creamright.com/Cream-Whipper-articles.html Obviously, this strategy wasn't greatly successful and we cancelled our work with the firm. However, we still have all of the "articles" on the site (about 50-60 pages total) and each page is navigable from the html and XML sitemaps. Additionally, the SEO firm we used built a lot of useless links to these pages from BS directory sites which are all still active. The question I have is whether we should remove these "article" pages or should leave them alone? Although I'm sure they aren't helping any of our SEO efforts, could deleting the pages after two years negatively impact our search rankings? Thanks in advance for any help on this, Doug M.
Web Design | | Loganshark1