Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
What type of website is best for seo.
I need a new website for my health insurance business. What type is best for SEO? Many thanks
Web Design | | laurentjb0 -
Has anyone ever tested to see if having an ads.txt file provided any SEO lift?
I know that the ads.txt system is designed to prevent ad fraud and technically has nothing to do with search. That said, the presence of such a file would seem to be an indicator of overall site quality because it would show that a site owner wants to participate in a fraud-free system. Has anyone ever tested that? If so, they don't seem to have published their results. Maybe it's a secret weapon that some pros are using and not sharing?
Web Design | | scodtt0 -
Are Breadcrumbs Really Necessary?
An SEO provider suggested we add breadcrumbs to the top of each page about 3 years ago, which we did. 3 years later we are going thru the site and find it really busy with lots of redundant and distracting elements. We would like to remove the breadcrumbs from the top of the pages. Is there any real SEO downside to doing so?
Web Design | | Kingalan1
All URLs are listed on our site map so I don't see why Google would not index all pages. Our domain is www.metro-manhattan.com I have uploaded a sample page with a breadcrumb. Thanks,
Alan kbbpS0 -
Website Redesign and Migration to Squarespace killed my Ranking
My old website was dated, ugly, impossible to update and a mess between hard-coded pages and WP, but we were ranking #1 in the organic searches for our key words. I just redesigned my website using Squarespace. I kept most of the same text on the pages (for key words) and kept the same Meta-Tags and Title Tags for each page as much as possible. Once I was satisfied that I had done as much on-page optimization as I could, I changed the IP in our Domain Name Registry so that it would point to our new website on the Squarespace host. And our new website was live! ...Then I watched in dismay as our ranking fell into oblivion. I think this might have something to do with not doing any 301 redirects from the old website and losing all of my link juice. Is this the case? And, if so, how do I fix it? Our website url is www.kanataskinclinic.ca Thanks
Web Design | | StillLearning1 -
Yes or No for Ampersand "&" in SEO URLs
Hi Mozzers I would like to know how crawlers see the ampersand (& or &) in your URLs and if Google frown upon this or not? As far as I know they purely recognise this as "and" is this correct and is there any best practice for implementing this, as I know a lot of people complained before about & in links and that it is better to use it as &, but this is not on links, this is on URLs. Reason for this is that we looking to move onto an ASP.Net MVC framework (any suggestions for a different framework are welcome, we still just planning out future development) and in order to make use of the filter options we have on our site we need a parameter to indicate the difference on a routing level (routing sends to controller, controller sends to model, model sends to controller and controller sends to view < this is pattern of a request that comes in on the framework we will be using). I already have -'s and /'s in the URLs (which is for my SEO structuring) so these syntax can't be used for identifying filters the user clicks or uses to define their search as it will create a complete mess in the system. Now we looking at & to say; OK, when a user lands on /accommodation and they selects De Kelders (which is a destination in our area) the page will be /accommodation/de-kelders on this page they can define their search further to say they are looking for 5 star accommodation and it should be close to the beach, this is where the routing needs some guidance and we looking to have it as follow: /accommodation/de-kelders/5-star&close-to-the-beach. Now, does the "&" get identified by search engines on a URL level as "and" and does this cause any issues with crawling or indexation or would it be best to look at another solution? Thanks, Chris Captivate
Web Design | | DROIDSTERS0 -
Pages vs. Posts for SEO
Hi, I would like your thoughts about pages vs. posts for SEO. I understand the difference in terms of WP structure and have read the SEOmoz blog post about setting up your site for SEO success (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success). However, if you're trying to rank for a particular keyword, it seems that either one could work, from an on-page SEO perspective, as far as title tag, URL, meta description, etc. So how do you decide whether to set up a page vs. a post? What are the pros and cons, from an SEO perspective, about using one vs. the other? Thanks in advance! Carolina
Web Design | | csmm0 -
Self hosted or YouTube Hosted Videos for SEO?
I am trying to plug holes in my site and the one thing that is lacking is unique videos. I was wondering what is the best way to go about videos for seo purposes? Should I just post onto a youtube channel and then embed into my site or should I look to just place videos on my site with software or should I use any of the other venders out there like Vimeo? Not sure which is the best route. Any tips?
Web Design | | bronxpad0 -
Javascript, PhP and SEO Impact?
What are the Pro's and Con's of using Java Script and PHP in a site when factoring in SEO?
Web Design | | bronxpad0