Will my site appear in search engines?

That depends on if search engines find your site interesting. There are several different algorithms used by modern search engines to "crawl" the internet and define search results. You can typically find out how each particular search engine does it by going to their site. Simply put, however, any page that you create in Squarespace is fair game for search engines! This means that you should probably not post something in an insecure area of your site if you don't want others to see it - this is the nature of how the public internet works. See controlling site access for information on real methods to protect secure information on Squarespace.

How do I get search engines to list my site?

You should get your friends to link to your site, or find other ways to get existing sites to link to you. We do not recommend submitting your site manually to search engines. We've heard a number of reports, which claim (very rationally) that if you have to submit your site to a search engine, it must not be very important (since the engine would find it through links normally). Search engines potentially use this method to rank your site lower. Your inclusion and ranking within search engines will be due to inbound links your site receives, not based on submission methods.

Why is my site not being crawled? I submitted my URL.

Search engines add new sites to their index by crawling them periodically. Once your site has been linked to from other sites on the web, and once an engine has decided to crawl your site, it may take up to 2 months to be included in a search engine's index. In addition, obtaining high ranks in search engines is extremely difficult, and after being listed, your site may not appear near the top results for any particular keyword for quite some time.

See the entry in this FAQ on getting readers for your site for better ways to promote a website besides search engines.

How do I get better rankings in search engines?

Your site will receive better rankings in search engines when there are more outside links to the content on your website. Getting these links requires visibility, which is why search engines aren't a great way to start promoting your website (unless you're paying them for advertising).

What is Google PageRank?

Google's PageRank assigns each website on the internet a number between 1 and 10, representing a relative importance factor (in the eyes of Google). This number is determined by the number of credible links to your site that Google can identify. The higher your site's PageRank is, the more precedence your site is given within search queries on terms that your site references -- it's your credibility rating with Google. Most sites on the internet have a PageRank 0. It becomes exponentially harder to move up in PageRank as the numbers increase. For example, there are only around 25 or so websites with PageRank 10.

How do I increase my PageRank?

PageRank is calculated by factoring the number of links to your website, along with the PageRank of each site linking to you (each link counts as a vote). More relevant links to your site will cause it's PageRank to go up. Every particular site's PageRank is updated by Google in a 1-2 month cycle. A single good link to your site is worth more on Google than hours of trying to tweak your XHTML to make the Google spider like your site.

Are there any issues with Squarespace sites and search engines?

Absolutely not! The following points are things Squarespace does that ensure your site can be optimally crawled and indexed by major search engines:

• Valid/Clean XHTML -- Squarespace sites are produced using completely clean and valid XHTML. This sort of structure helps crawlers easily scan the content on your site. Additionally, since your site has a solid underlying structure and is linked together coherently -- crawlers will have a simple time moving about all of the pages of your site.
• Embedded RSS -- If you're using a Journal, the RSS feeds for your journal will be embedded in the code of your pages. Modern crawlers take these cues and remember to crawl your site more frequently, as sites with RSS are updated more frequently than static sites.
• Domain Mapping -- If you're using a custom domain with Squarespace, our Domain Mapping feature ensures that our squarespace.com domain is completely removed from all code on your site. Crawlers will understand your site to be indexed properly at your domain's location.
• Clean URLs -- All major pages on your Squarespace site are presented at distinct URLs that are free from special characters. This formatting indicates to engines where the primary content on your site is at -- and allows the URLs to be presented within search engines very clearly.
• Clean Titles -- All major pages on your Squarespace site have titles formatted properly, and Squarespace includes relevant text from your content within your page titles. This structure is optimal for search engine indexing.

At the end of the day -- all of these items can contribute to the success of your site within search engines, and it's important that they're addressed. However, a site lacking all of the above items, that instead has quality inbound links (see the above topics), will always rank higher in modern engines.

How can I optimize my site for search engines?

It's already optimized. See the above question! Squarespace generated sites have clean XHTML, proper tagging, and proper META information — all of which is essential to helping web crawlers find and index your site properly.

What are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services?

Generally, very sketchy services. Check Google's SEO Information page for more information. We don't recommend you use SEO services.

Search engines explicitly work to drop exploitative sites (such as link farms used by some SEO individuals) from their indicies, so be wary of firms that claim to be able to increase your rank. Google's job is to halt this behavior, and remove sites that are attempting to manipulate their search rankings through such techniques.

If you want good rankings within search engines, just write good content — search engines will work to find you instead of the other way around.

Also, your Squarespace page is automatically optimized for any search engine robots that may find it. We use the proper tags in the proper places and ensure important URLs appear static.

How can I promote my site through search engines? Why are my rankings bad?

Your rankings are determined almost solely on the number of inbound links your have to your content, and the relative credibility of the sites linking to you. Write good content, receive those links, and you'll have good rankings.

There are entire books written on the topic of search engine optimization, and in general, search engine companies work hard to ensure these books have inaccurate information very quickly. Search engines are in the job of making sure content that is queried for is accurate and relevant, and this generally means that pages that do not have links from a large number of other websites are not given priority.

In addition, it helps to title your pages and journal entries properly, as Squarespace will structure your page properly for spidering based on those titles.

Unless you're paying for advertisement placement, or have a well established website, relying on search engines is generally a terrible way of generating website traffic for a new (under 1 year old) website.

I seem to be getting almost no traffic from search engine spiders. Why are they ignoring my site?

Unless your website has over 100 or so incoming links, search engines may index your site very sparsely. You can expect to see more traffic from search engines when you have established more credibility on the web (credibility being determined by links to your site by third parties that have already had links to their sites).

Are spiders ignoring my site because of < insert mythical SEO practice >?

Your site, as generated by Squarespace, already incorporates all well known methods for allowing your site to be read easily by search spiders. Your site is presented to spiders using clear, easy to read XHTML that rivals any hand-crafted code you could produce. Items like META tags have not been relevant for search engine rankings for over 5 years. Why is this? Because they provide no additional information for a search spider that it didn't already know. Search spiders will index your site based on its actual content (not "author defined" content) and inbound links (primarily inbound links). Your time spent following lore related to search engine tricks would be better spent focusing on great content -- as that's exactly what the search engines would love to give you a higher ranking for.

What about link exchange programs? Those increase the inbound links to my site.

While these programs or exchanges may increase the raw number of links to your site, you run an extremely high risk of Google identifying your site as one that participates in exchanges with, or receives links from, low-quality sites. Google (and presumably, other engines) will use these links the opposite of the way they use valid links to your site -- decreasing your rankings further.

How does paid advertising work on the web?

Advertising on the internet generally falls into two categories:

• Pay Per Click — The most popular form of advertising for individuals and small businesses. This allows you to pay for traffic on a per-click basis, usually though a bidding process. Google's AdWord program or Overture (the company Yahoo search uses) currently have the largest programs for pay per click advertising, and the most exposure.
• Pay Per Impression — If you're interested in spending a large amount of money, pay per impression advertising (the banners that appear on most news sites, for example), allows you to reach wider audiences with your messaging. Pick a site and inquire about rates. Depending on the industry and site, this may be an affordable method for exposure.

What is spamming?

Spamming is the act of sending unsolicited electronic messages in bulk. In the case of discussion forums, blogs or message boards, this definition can be extended to include any unsolicited messaging whatsoever.

As mentioned above, spamming generally infuriates site owners (imagine everyone on the internet simply posting what they want about their own sites on your own site). As such, spamming should be avoided — as it will quickly create a large amount of negative publicity for your site. If you're wondering if posting your URL somewhere will be considered spamming, consider if the primary intent of your posting is for promotion. If so, and you don't have any content to back up your URL mention, don't do it.

Can I stop my site from appearing in search engines?

Squarespace can mark your website as "no-index", which will suggest to robots that they should not index your website. This is followed well by popular search engine spiders, but not so well by other internet spiders, which may ignore the directive. The only true way to keep information from not being spidered is to not place it on the public internet.

This setting can be specified from [Structure > Website Settings > Search/Indexing] within the site manager.

Where can I insert my Google Analytics (or other tracking Javascript) code into

You add code that will appear between the <head> tags for your site within the [Website Management > Structure > Website Settings > Code Injection] under Extra Header Code.This region will not accept invalid HTML, so please remember to close single tags properly. (What we mean is: tags that look like <meta something="something"> should actually be <meta something="something"/> — note the /> on the end.)

Why don't you make it easier to edit meta tags?

Squarespace already fills in all meta tags that are used by modern search engines. If you're inquiring about the meta "keywords" tag, we feel that no major search engine has used this tag for half of a decade — and we omit it because it is totally obsolete. You should consult Google's resources if you're wondering how modern search engines rank websites. See this section of our FAQ for more information.

Google is displaying my squarespace.com domain instead of my custom mapped domain. How do I get Google to recognize my new domain?

Register your site with Google's Webmaster Tools. After doing this, you'll be able to tell Google which of your domains you'd like to be shown in their index.

Google Sitemaps / Webmaster Tools is asking me to upload a file to my site for verification...how do I do this on Squarespace?

To verify your site with Google Sitemaps, follow these steps:

1. Select 'Add a Meta Tag' as your verification method, and insert the code they issue you within[Structure > Website Settings > Code Injection > Extra Header Code] within your site manager.
2. From within Google's interface, re-verify your site.

Note: You need to ensure your meta tag is properly closed when adding this to your site. It should look like:

<meta name="xxxxxx" content="xxxxxx" />

Note the closing "/" at the end of the tag.