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?
It could be due to the massive growth Substack is experiencing this year. With so many new people joining and starting random accounts, it makes sense to be stricter and not immediately index everyone and give them a sitemap.
A brand new publication has nothing to show. A few weeks later, if posting consistently, there's some content that can actually be indexed, both pages and posts.
So maybe it's actually fair.
We just keep doing the work, and see what Substack and search engines decide :)
thats actually incorrect- maybe for someone who cant validate their account .
Those that can you go directly through google- for those bot spam accounts yes it has gotten more difficult here, and you have access to play with your URL and how you are searched in google which they do not allow spambot suspected accounts access to you must verify the account.
know a little in basic HTML, and SEO options- bam you can actually appear right at the top of google’s engine return right on day 1 unless you took a name that is highly searched and burried.
i just set up my account april 30- it was bit of a pain in the ass actually between linking up options to accept payments, a lot of verifications there, then getting into substack, i took html in college, they handle the URLS in a way to actually present them to google if you use proper SEO connections, and tags and don't blow it way with tons of tags to overwhelm the engine
but there is in an option in substack to go in through the google authenticator to actually manage how your URL is displayed in the google search engine- if you have a particularly common tag or name that is searched a lot- you are less likely to come back near the top of the list- then even there you can connect other url tags - people can try 2 or 3 words right into the engine and bam your right there-
there is also i believe another algorithm picked up in the notes- it tags the first entry lines as high priority placement order- so lets say you'd written a new story about dracula- you'd do a intro in about the first 250 characters with words people would use to search dracula, weave it into a intro for the note that describe the message but triggers the google scrubbers to pick you up .
doesn't mean you earn subscribers lol, but you will see a lot more in your stats on impressions from outside sources- someone finding you thru FB or another site- but the most common is the google search engine,.
but that google engine URL is big for bringing new offsite impressions.
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?
It could be due to the massive growth Substack is experiencing this year. With so many new people joining and starting random accounts, it makes sense to be stricter and not immediately index everyone and give them a sitemap.
A brand new publication has nothing to show. A few weeks later, if posting consistently, there's some content that can actually be indexed, both pages and posts.
So maybe it's actually fair.
We just keep doing the work, and see what Substack and search engines decide :)
I agree. It must be because of that, I think. Also we can manually index some articles if we really want to, so it's fine I think. 👀✨
I'm wondering the same thing, haha. ^^'
thats actually incorrect- maybe for someone who cant validate their account .
Those that can you go directly through google- for those bot spam accounts yes it has gotten more difficult here, and you have access to play with your URL and how you are searched in google which they do not allow spambot suspected accounts access to you must verify the account.
know a little in basic HTML, and SEO options- bam you can actually appear right at the top of google’s engine return right on day 1 unless you took a name that is highly searched and burried.
I see. That's interesting... 👀✨
i just set up my account april 30- it was bit of a pain in the ass actually between linking up options to accept payments, a lot of verifications there, then getting into substack, i took html in college, they handle the URLS in a way to actually present them to google if you use proper SEO connections, and tags and don't blow it way with tons of tags to overwhelm the engine
but there is in an option in substack to go in through the google authenticator to actually manage how your URL is displayed in the google search engine- if you have a particularly common tag or name that is searched a lot- you are less likely to come back near the top of the list- then even there you can connect other url tags - people can try 2 or 3 words right into the engine and bam your right there-
there is also i believe another algorithm picked up in the notes- it tags the first entry lines as high priority placement order- so lets say you'd written a new story about dracula- you'd do a intro in about the first 250 characters with words people would use to search dracula, weave it into a intro for the note that describe the message but triggers the google scrubbers to pick you up .
doesn't mean you earn subscribers lol, but you will see a lot more in your stats on impressions from outside sources- someone finding you thru FB or another site- but the most common is the google search engine,.
but that google engine URL is big for bringing new offsite impressions.
I see. I didn't know that. That was very informative, thanks! ✨
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
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! ^^