checked my newsletter all old has sitemap, new one has not. I don't understand substack's these decision. are they not interested in free seo traffic? or do they not want the newsletter get crawled?
Hi, this is an interesting history on Substack's sitemap.xml, thank you! I set up my Substack this past summer and had to work around this shortcoming as well. Here's a couple of things that I found out while setting up SEO using Google Search Console (GSC) for my Substack. First, you can still have GSC index your site but instead of providing the sitemap.xml you can add the /feed route and GSC will parse it as RSS instead and still be able to find your pages. However, since my Substack is small it didn't index every page, so I did start manually adding the paths to index which is when I found out that there's a hidden limit to how many you can manually index otherwise it says that you've exceeded your limit. Anyway, thanks again for all the details, this was a very interesting post!
Thanks for recommending this post @kristikoeter. At least I now know why my publication has not sitemap. Eyeroll for Substack* such unnecessary demo of SEO power. Basic tools should be left basic....
I think your posts are indexed, so they show up on Google, and you're receiving traffic. But your homepage is not? I'll look into it and let you if I find something. Thanks for letting me know! :)
Okay, I looked into your publication website. And I could come up with one reason for this:
I think the crawlers that found your posts and indexed them, they probably found them to be useful-- maybe because you add useful links in your articles, or the links of your articles are in other writers' articles. (Yep! Being shared by other people can help crawlers find you).
Those indexed pages are now "known" to the crawlers. Crawlers travel from known pages to new pages, to discover and index them.
Your Homepage and About page are not showing up on search because they haven't been linked with any known pages.
You can try this:
1. Search for your publication with "site:yourwebsite .substack .com". (Remove the spaces I added here, and make sure not to use any capital letters). And open some of your articles that show up in search. Add the link to your homepage somewhere in some of those articles.
The crawlers crawl posts monthly to look for edits they can update in the index. So they may find your homepage in a month and add it to the index.
Or there's another reason a page might not show up on Google: the content of the page don't follow Google's Content Guidelines.
But these are all just speculations I drew from what I learned. So all we can do it try things and see if something works.
checked my newsletter all old has sitemap, new one has not. I don't understand substack's these decision. are they not interested in free seo traffic? or do they not want the newsletter get crawled?
I'm wondering the same thing, haha. ^^'
Hi, this is an interesting history on Substack's sitemap.xml, thank you! I set up my Substack this past summer and had to work around this shortcoming as well. Here's a couple of things that I found out while setting up SEO using Google Search Console (GSC) for my Substack. First, you can still have GSC index your site but instead of providing the sitemap.xml you can add the /feed route and GSC will parse it as RSS instead and still be able to find your pages. However, since my Substack is small it didn't index every page, so I did start manually adding the paths to index which is when I found out that there's a hidden limit to how many you can manually index otherwise it says that you've exceeded your limit. Anyway, thanks again for all the details, this was a very interesting post!
I see. I didn't know there was a limit to manual indexing. Thank you so much for sharing the info!
And I'm glad it helped. ^^ ✨
Thanks for recommending this post @kristikoeter. At least I now know why my publication has not sitemap. Eyeroll for Substack* such unnecessary demo of SEO power. Basic tools should be left basic....
I agree with you. Also thanks for reading!
I'm happy to know you find it helpful and my article is being shared, haha. :) ✨
Lil bit confusing for me but yup I get it
But I can't find my substack my opening that site:_____.com
Haha!!
But still if i see in traffic of my newsletter where they coming from i saw some view are Google and Bing are present there
I think your posts are indexed, so they show up on Google, and you're receiving traffic. But your homepage is not? I'll look into it and let you if I find something. Thanks for letting me know! :)
Yup, definitely!!
Okay, I looked into your publication website. And I could come up with one reason for this:
I think the crawlers that found your posts and indexed them, they probably found them to be useful-- maybe because you add useful links in your articles, or the links of your articles are in other writers' articles. (Yep! Being shared by other people can help crawlers find you).
Those indexed pages are now "known" to the crawlers. Crawlers travel from known pages to new pages, to discover and index them.
Your Homepage and About page are not showing up on search because they haven't been linked with any known pages.
You can try this:
1. Search for your publication with "site:yourwebsite .substack .com". (Remove the spaces I added here, and make sure not to use any capital letters). And open some of your articles that show up in search. Add the link to your homepage somewhere in some of those articles.
The crawlers crawl posts monthly to look for edits they can update in the index. So they may find your homepage in a month and add it to the index.
Or there's another reason a page might not show up on Google: the content of the page don't follow Google's Content Guidelines.
But these are all just speculations I drew from what I learned. So all we can do it try things and see if something works.
I hope this helps! :)
Oh!!
Tnx for this, I'll definitely try to learn more and look into this matter too.
No probs! Sure! ^^
I read your post and wrote a tool so Google can find your Substack. Substack to React Converter https://open.substack.com/pub/nikbearbrown/p/substack-to-react-converter