**How to Solve Squarespace Website not Showing up on Google (Fix Indexing Issues) โ€” Transcript & Summary | SozAI** Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/solve-squarespace-website-google-indexing/ Learn how to fix Squarespace website indexing issues and get your pages to show up on Google with practical SEO steps. ## Key Takeaways - Connecting to Google Search Console and submitting a sitemap is essential for indexing. - Requesting indexing and testing URLs in Google Search Console helps identify and fix issues. - New websites may experience delayed indexing due to Google's sandbox effect. - Backlinks significantly boost domain authority and improve indexing and ranking. - Using SEO tools can streamline the indexing and troubleshooting process. ## What the video covers - Connect your Squarespace website to Google Search Console and submit your sitemap to improve indexing chances. - Use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console to request indexing for individual pages and test live URLs for errors. - Understand the concept of Google's sandbox, where new websites may be held back from indexing for up to three months. - Build high-quality backlinks to increase your domain authority and improve your website's ranking potential. - Use SEO Space's competitor analysis tool to check backlinks and monitor your website's SEO performance. - Follow a step-by-step approach starting from basic setup to troubleshooting stubborn indexing issues. - Recognize that time and consistent SEO efforts can resolve many indexing problems for new websites. - Leverage SEO tools and plugins to simplify the process of requesting indexing and monitoring page status. - Identify and fix technical issues on pages that may prevent Google from indexing them. - Understand that indexing requests do not guarantee immediate appearance on Google but improve chances. Answers ## Questions about this video How do I connect my Squarespace website to Google Search Console? Go to your Squarespace dashboard, navigate to Settings > Third Party Tools > Connected Accounts, then connect your Google Search Console account using your Google credentials. What should I do if my Squarespace pages are not showing up on Google after submitting a sitemap? Use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console to request indexing for individual pages and test the live URL for any errors that might prevent indexing. What is Google's sandbox and how does it affect new websites? Google's sandbox is an unofficial term for a period of about three months where new websites may have limited visibility on Google as the search engine builds trust before ranking them. ## Full Transcript โ€” Download SRT & Markdown 00:00 Speaker A Hi everyone, welcome to SEO Space. You're watching this video because you've got pages on your website that are not showing up on Google. Maybe you've seen this from our SEO tasks, or you're actually on our plugin and you've had it flagged that this web page is not on Google. So in this video, I'm going to walk you through five things that you can do to give your web pages the best chance of showing up on Google. And then, if after following those steps your web pages still aren't showing up on Google, at the end of the video, I'm going to walk you through three things that you can then go through in order to troubleshoot this issue and just what I've found is most likely to get your web pages on Google. Now, just getting straight into it, we're going to go through the five things that you should be doing to get your web pages on Google, starting with the most basic and then going up from there. The first thing that I want you to do is make sure that you've connected your website to Google Search Console and added your sitemap. Google Search Console is Google's native platform where you can see how you're showing up on Google and also tell Google that you're ready to be shown up. Now, because you're watching this video, I'm assuming you've already done this step, so if you have, you can skip to the next one. If you haven't already, what I want you to do is head over to the Squarespace dashboard. Then you go over to Settings. From there, you're going to head over to Third Party Tools, select Connected Accounts, then you're going to go to Connect Account and then select Google Search Console. You do need a Google account in order to do this properly. So once you've actually connected Google Search Console from the Squarespace settings, all I want you to do is type in Google Search Console into the internet. You can then head over to the Google Search Console dashboard from here, which after a few days, you'll start to see data around how your Squarespace website is showing up. Now, that's the first step, making sure you connect to Google Search Console. But then what I want you to do is to submit your sitemap. Now, your sitemap is a map of all the pages on your Squarespace website, which you need to submit to Google in order to boost your chances of ranking. In order to submit it, all you need to do, as long as you've connected Google Search Console the way that I've just shown you, you head over to Sitemaps and then in this box here, I want you to type sitemap.xml and then press Submit. As you can see, I've already done this for SEO Space's website, and again, this is just going to boost your chances of showing up. So now we've covered the first step of boosting your chances of showing up on Google, what I want you to do is just come back to either SEO Tasks, where you might have seen that you've got pages not showing up on Google, or even our plugin if this is how you're finding this tutorial. Now, from here, we've made it really easy to ask Google to index an individual web page. As you can see here, we've got a button, Request Indexing, and then another one, Ask Google to Index. And what this button is actually going to do is going to take you over to Google Search Console, and it's going to take you to this URL inspection page. So for any page on your Squarespace website, you can actually head over to this Inspect box here, and you can inspect this URL, and Google Search Console is going to tell you whether the page is on Google or not. And that's the reason that we added this feature, because when you press Request Indexing, you'll be taken to this page, and then from there, you're going to see a little button here, little snippet of text that says Request Indexing, and this actually asks Google in order to display this page on Google search engines. So it's a really helpful feature. Now, this doesn't ensure your page is going to be shown. I've already done this step on this web page, but it's still not indexed, which is why you need to follow the steps that I'm going to walk you through later in this video. However, this is a really helpful tool, and it solves most of the issues that I see. So as you can see here, indexing is requested. But just before we move on to step three, I'm just going to show you one last thing when it comes to step two. If you've got really stubborn pages which just aren't indexing, you can stay in Google Search Console on this view, and here you can press Test Live URL. And what this is going to do is going to ask Google Search Console to test this page to see if there's any errors that are holding you back from being indexed. And this is super helpful for stubborn pages because there may be things going wrong on the page that you just didn't realize. So before moving on to step three, make sure you just do this to make sure there's nothing holding you back. And as you can see here, this is the live test results, and you can see that this URL is available on Google. So I've requested indexing, I've inspected the URL, it is available to Google, so if it still doesn't index, that's where I'm going to move on to step three, four, and five of this video. Now, step three of getting your Squarespace web pages indexed on Google actually requires you to take a step back, and a concept that I'm going to introduce to you is something called Google's sandbox. When a new website launches, it usually gets placed in something called Google sandbox. Now, this is sort of an unofficial term in the industry; it's not something confirmed by Google, but when I explain it to you, hopefully it's going to make sense. Essentially, Google has something called a sandbox, which it puts new websites in for around three months, which is actually going to hold back its visibility on Google search engines. Now, the reason that Google does this is because it wants to trust your website before it shows it on Google to the billions of people that are searching every single day. And if your Squarespace website is new and you're facing indexing issues, this could be an indication that you're in Google sandbox. Now, as I've mentioned, this isn't like an official thing that Google actually states that it has, but it's just something that SEO professionals often see with new websites where they're held back, they're put in the sandbox for a couple of months until Google trusts it more in order to rank it. So if your Squarespace website is new, it may just be worth working on other areas of SEO, waiting a couple of months until you get out of this sandbox, and you're more likely to be indexed because sometimes with these indexing issues, time really is the cure. So even though it can be a little bit frustrating, this is something that a lot of websites face, and if you wait a couple of months, often these indexing issues are solved. Now, of course, you may be facing indexing issues on key pages of your website, so you may not want to wait a couple of months. So that's where we're going to move on to step four, which is the fourth thing that you can do in order to boost your chances of getting indexed, and that is backlinks. Now, backlinks are links from other websites to yours, and they boost something called your domain authority. Your domain authority is a score of your website which deems how much more authority it has on the internet. The more high-quality backlinks you have, i.e., links from reputable websites in your niche, the higher your domain authority. The more likely Google is going to take you seriously and rank you on Google and even rank you for highly competitive, highly searched terms. So in order to boost our chances of ranking on Google, we need to make sure that our website has backlinks. In order to see how many backlinks you have, I want you to head over to SEO Space's competitor analysis tool, and I want you to add your own website in the competitor analysis tool because what this is going to allow you to do is it's going to allow you to analyze your own website in order to see how many backlinks you have. So for example, as you can see here, I've just added SEO Space, and SEO Space is showing SEO Space's. 00:14 Speaker A flagged that this web page is not on Google so in this video I'm going to walk you through five things that you can do to give your web pages the best chance of showing up on Google and then 00:25 Speaker A if after following those steps your web pages still aren't showing up on Google at the end of the video I'm going to walk you through three things that you can then go through in order to Tripes shho this issue and just what I've found 00:37 Speaker A is most likely to get your web pages on Google now just getting straight into it we're going to go through the five things that you should be doing to get your web pages on Google starting with the most basic and then going up from 00:50 Speaker A there the first thing that I want you to do is make sure that you've connected your website to Google search console and added your sit map Google search console is Google native platform where you can see how you're showing up on 01:03 Speaker A Google and also tell Google that you're ready to be shown up now because you're watching this video I'm assuming you've already done this step so if you have you can skip to the next one if you haven't already what I want you to do is 01:15 Speaker A head over to the Squarespace dashboard then you go over to settings from there you're going to head over to third party tools select connected accounts then you're going to go to connect account and then select Google search console you do need a Google 01:36 Speaker A account in order to do this properly so once you've actually connected Google search console from the Squarespace settings all I want you to do is type in Google search console into the internet you can then head over to the Google 01:50 Speaker A search console dashboard from here which after a few days you'll start to see data around how your Squarespace website is showing up now that's the first step making sure you connect to Google search console but then what I want you to do 02:03 Speaker A is to submit your sit map now your sit map is a map of all the pages on your Squarespace website which you need to submit to Google in order to boost your chances of ranking in order to submit it 02:15 Speaker A all you need to do as long as you've connected Google search console the way that I've just shown you you head over to sitemaps and then in this box here I want you to type sitemap.xml and then press submit as you can see 02:31 Speaker A I've already done this for SEO space's website and again this is just going to boost your chances of showing up so now we've covered the first step of boosting your chances of showing up on Google what I want you to do is just come back 02:44 Speaker A to either SEO tasks where you might have seen that you've got Pages not showing up on Google or even our plugin if this is how you're finding this tutorial now from here we've made it really easy to ask Google to index an individual web 02:58 Speaker A page as you can see here we've got got a button request indexing and then another one ask Google to index and what this button is actually going to do is going to take you over to Google search console and it's going to take you to 03:11 Speaker A this URL inspection page so for any page on your Squarespace website you can actually head over to this inspect box here and you can inspect this URL and Google search console is going to tell you whether the page is on Google or not 03:27 Speaker A and that's the reason that we added this feature because when you press EST indexing you'll be taken to this page and then from there you're going to see a little button here little snippet of text that says request indexing and this 03:40 Speaker A actually asks Google in order to display this page on Google search engines so it's a really helpful feature now this doesn't ensure your page is going to be shown I've already done this step on this web page but it's still not indexed 03:53 Speaker A which is why you need to follow the steps that I'm going to walk you through later in this video however this is a really helpful tool and it solves most of the issues that I see so as you can 04:03 Speaker A see here indexing is requested but just before we move on to step three I'm just going to show you one last thing when it comes to step two if you've got really stubborn Pages which just aren't indexing you can stay in Google search 04:15 Speaker A console on this View and here you can press test live URL and what this is going to do is going to ask Google search console to test this page to see if there's any errors that are holding you back from being indexed and this is 04:29 Speaker A super helpful for stubborn Pages because there may be things going wrong on the page that you just didn't realize so before moving on to step three make sure you just do this to make sure there's nothing holding you back and as you can 04:40 Speaker A see here this is the live test results and you can see that this URL is available on Google so I've requested indexing I've inspected the URL it is available to Google so if it still doesn't index that's where I'm going to 04:52 Speaker A move on to step three four and five of this video now step three of getting your Squarespace web pages indexed on Google actually requires you to take a step back and a concept that I'm going to introduce to you is something called 05:05 Speaker A Google's sandbox when a new website launches it usually gets placed in something called Google sandbox now this is sort of an unofficial term in the industry it's not something confirmed by Google but when I explain it to you 05:17 Speaker A hopefully it's going to make sense essentially Google has something called it sandbox which it puts new websites in for around 3 months which is actually going to hold back its visibility on Google search engines now the reason that Google does this is because it 05:32 Speaker A wants to trust your website before it shows it on Google to the billions of people that are searching every single day and if your Squarespace website is new and you're facing indexing issues this could be an indication that you're 05:44 Speaker A in Google sandbox now as I've mentioned this isn't like an official thing that Google actually states that it has but it's just something that SEO professionals often see with new websites where they're held back they're put in the sandbox for a couple of 05:57 Speaker A months until Google trusts it more in order to rank it so if your Squarespace website is new it may just be worth working on other areas of SEO waiting a couple of months until you get out of this sandbox and you're more likely to 06:10 Speaker A be indexed because sometimes with these indexing issues time really is the cure so even though it can be a little bit frustrating this is something that a lot of websites face and if you wait a couple of months often these index and 06:23 Speaker A issues are solved now of course you may be facing indexing issues on key pages of your website so you may not want to wait a couple of months so that's where we're going to walk on to step four 06:33 Speaker A which is the fourth thing that you can do in order to boost your chances of getting indexed and that is backlinks now backlinks are links from other websites to yours and they boost something called your domain Authority your domain Authority is a score of your 06:48 Speaker A website which deems how much of more Authority is on the internet the more high quality backlinks you have I.E links from reputable websites in your Niche the higher your domain Authority the more likely Google is going to take 07:01 Speaker A you seriously and rank you on Google and even rank you for highly competitive highly Search terms so in order to boost our chances of ranking on Google we need to make sure that our website has backlinks in order to see how many back 07:16 Speaker A links you have I want you to head over to SEO spaces competitor analysis tool and I want you to add your own website in the competitor analysis tool because what this is going to allow you to do it's going to allow you to analyze your 07:30 Speaker A own website in order to see how many backlinks you have so for example as you can see here I've just added SEO space and SEO space is showing SEO space's website it's showing how many backlinks the website actually has and the domain 07:45 Speaker A Authority which as I mentioned is a score from 0 to one of how much an authority is on the internet and then as you can see here this is an estimate of the number of back links I.E links from 07:57 Speaker A other websites to SEO space the SEO spaces website has and once you do this on your own website it's going to give you a really good understanding of whether your website has domain Authority at all whether you've got any 08:10 Speaker A backlinks and whether this could be something that's holding you back if your domain Authority is super low I'm talking sort of less than five and you don't have many backlinks then this could be a reason why you're facing 08:21 Speaker A indexing problems because your Authority just isn't high enough for Google to take you seriously and crawl your website even more and boost your chances of showing up on Google Now exactly how to get back links is a topic for another 08:34 Speaker A video however it's definitely worth completing this fourth step to see if you've got any backlinks because if you don't that could be a reason why you're facing those issues which then moves us on to step five that I want you to go 08:46 Speaker A through to boost your chances of getting indexed and this is actually on page SEO so what I'm going to do I'm going to head over to the pages that aren't showing up on Google on SEO space's website to show you an example so I'm 08:59 Speaker A going to get this this page here now if you've got pages that aren't showing up on Google one of the key things that you need to do and then the last thing that I'm going to walk you through is making 09:09 Speaker A sure that you've got your onpage SEO correct onpage SEO is essentially just making sure the content on your web page is optimized for search engines and that's one of the things that our extension does our extension walks you 09:22 Speaker A through step bystep how to improve your on page SEO and something that I see really commonly with pages that don't get indexed is actually having thin content thin content is when you have less than 300 words on a web page as you 09:37 Speaker A can see here this page is getting flagged as having thin content and the reason why thin content I.E having less than 300 words on your web page isn't good for indexing is because when Google crawls your website and analyzes what it 09:51 Speaker A should show up for on Google search engines if you don't have enough content on your web page how is Google going to understand what that web page should for it needs to have content so Google understands what it's about and then 10:04 Speaker A ultimately is able to display it on search engines for things that people are searching into Google so if you don't have enough content you need to make sure you add more high quality content so Google can analyze it and 10:16 Speaker A ultimately display you on search engines for different Search terms of course this is just one check you do need to make sure you go through and fix as many of these checks as possible in order to boost your chances and then also take a 10:29 Speaker A step back because sometimes you might have a high score but if the content on your web page isn't high quality if it isn't unique if it's just generic AI content if it's the same as anything out there on the internet why is Google 10:42 Speaker A going to index you you need to make sure you give Google a reason to index you which is why we make sure we follow on page best practices I you get this score high but you also then take a step back 10:53 Speaker A to make sure that the web page actually provides value to Google and its users because remember Google is a business and it wants to make sure that the pages that it shows up on search engines are high value because if it's high value 11:07 Speaker A and it's users find them then it's more likely to trust Google and keep coming back but if it shows low quality content people are going to think the search results are rubbish and are less likely to come back you want to give Google's 11:18 Speaker A business a reason to index you which is why we follow those best practices and why we provide quality content on the web pages of course this is going to require you to be honest take that step back and really assess is the content on 11:31 Speaker A this web page really worth indexing because if it isn't then that's probably why Google isn't showing you now if you followed all of these steps and Google still isn't indexing certain pages or your website on Google search engines 11:45 Speaker A and walk you through three things that you can do in order to overcome this and the first one is maybe something that you don't want to hear I've already touched upon this earlier in the video but it is time Google has got billions 11:57 Speaker A of websites in order to go through which means it's potentially tens hundreds of millions of pages that he's got to go through in order to index on search engines so you're one of billions of different web pages that are in the 12:09 Speaker A queue and this sometimes means that you just need to wait a little bit of time once you follow these steps once you've gone through the things as long as you've got enough backlinks and your page is high quality I'm very very 12:20 Speaker A confident that you will rank sometimes it just takes a little bit of time the second thing that you just need to reassess if you followed all of those steps is just come back to back links because backlinks is a thing that I see 12:30 Speaker A come up time and time again especially website owners that are early on in their SEO Journey maybe you didn't know what backlinks were before watching this video if your website doesn't have enough backlinks as I've already mentioned Google just is less likely to 12:43 Speaker A take you seriously so if you followed all those steps you've checked how many back links you have and it's still not working and your pages still aren't being indexed you are likely going to need to revisit this build more back 12:54 Speaker A links which as I mentioned is a topic for another video which will boost your chances of getting ranked the third and final thing that I want you to assess if your pages still aren't getting indexed on Google is whether the pages that 13:07 Speaker A aren't being indexed are really for indexing and what I mean when I say for indexing is is it actually a page on your Squarespace website that you want to be indexed I.E you want to show up on search engines so for example as you can 13:21 Speaker A see on SEO space's website these are two live webinar Pages which are in a navigation as you can see here these are all of our free live webinars and this is just a page that someone can visit in 13:33 Speaker A order to sign up for this webinar there's no content on it and really there's no reason for Google in order to show it up and to be honest this isn't even a page that I really want to show 13:43 Speaker A up on Google it's not high priority for me my main pages that I want to show up on my homepage are a highest page a SEO course page you know there's just some pages on our website and on your website 13:55 Speaker A where it really doesn't matter whether they're being indexed other examples are your terms and conditions your privacy policy Pages you know those aren't really important when it comes to driving more revenue and more business for your website so if you're facing 14:10 Speaker A indexing issues on pages like this sometimes it's just worth not worrying about because sometimes you've just got pages on your website which really don't matter that much and that's actually a reason when you add a new website to SEO 14:22 Speaker A space or you re audit it that's actually a reason that we have the option to skip Pages as you can see here we've recommend skipping pages that you don't want to appear on Google such as privacy policy Pages thank you Pages maybe even 14:37 Speaker A one off promotional pages that you have if you're facing indexing issues on those pages I recommend just skipping them completely it's not worth losing sleep over it because there's many other things that you can focus on in order to 14:49 Speaker A move the needle with your SEO efforts and grow your business and I don't want you to be focus on things that aren't going to move the needle which is why we have this option to skip pages that you 14:59 Speaker A want to exclude from the sitewide audit so they no longer show up as pag is not indexed and no longer hold back your score so there you are guys that is a complete run through of how to solve 15:10 Speaker A indexing issues on your squares website of course if you have any questions if you have any problems come through the chat icon in this bottom right hand corner we'll be more than happy to help hopefully this has solved your indexing 15:22 Speaker A issues and I'll see you in the next video Topics: Squarespace SEO Google indexing Google Search Console sitemap submission website backlinks domain authority SEO troubleshooting Google sandbox website ranking SEO tools Study this video - [Flashcards from this video](https://sozai.app/tools/ai-flashcard-generator/?from=transcript&id=68566) - [Quiz on this video](https://sozai.app/tools/quiz-generator/?from=transcript&id=68566) Free, made by AI from this transcript. 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