SEO-friendly URLs for blog categories - Squarespace News
SEO-friendly URLs for blog categories
Squarespace improves its seo performance
We’re a website design studio in Devon, designing stunning websites for creatively-inclined businesses across the UK and this is a bit of industry news related to the Squarespace platform and its impact on its SEO performance.
Squarespace gets a bad rap for its SEO performance, which is undeserved, but equally it is putting effort into improving its offering.
On that note, I'll be writing more on SEO considerations when choosing Squarespace as your website platform (N.B. we are Squarespace specialists) so that you know the facts and important points.
The latest news is that it has changed the blog collection URL structure to improve blog content SEO.
Squarespace category and tag slugs previously
To view all posts within a category or tag, you would use the following URLs:
/blog-slug?category=category-slug
/blog-slug?tag=tag-slug
New structure for category & tag slugs in Squarespace
You can now access these same category and tag lists using the following URL formats, which are preferred by Google:
/blog-slug/category/category-slug
/blog-slug/tag/tag-slug
You can read more about Google's advice on best practice for organising your site hierarchy and URL structure here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en#hierarchy
What to watch out for with Squarespace URL slugs
Old URLs will continue to work as usual, so no existing links will be broken
Squarespace has also updated canonical tags and XML sitemaps to use the new URLs
Again, sites will automatically update to use the new category/tag URL format next time changes are made to a site
Future developments with Squarespace URL slugs
Squarespace is planning to update links generated by templates and the summary and archive blocks to use the new format so they can be indexed as real URLs and build page authority
Similarly, it plans to make improvements to the URL format for blog author page pages and product category/tag pages
Other comments on Squarespace URL slugs
Squarespace has had a naughty habit of implementing major changes at short notice without letting people know
This has caused a lot of grief, so the public announcement and the fact that existing links won't be broken is obviously helpful
Squarespace has been fixing a few other things, which is good to see, including: friendly URLs for tags and categories (this update); dropping trailing slashes; allowing meta tags to be edited; hiding page from search engine results
Other things that need fixing
Making tags and categories indexable - currently Squarespace implements a noindex robots.txt by default on tags and categories, which is not ideal. Here's what Google says about this in terms of best practice:
Keep resources crawlable. Blocking page resources can give Google an incomplete picture of your website. This often happens when your robots.txt file is blocking access to some or all of your page resources.
Preventing a site title from forming an overall h1 heading tag. This is a biggie. Currently, Squarespace uses headers for formatting, which is not ideal. Here's what Google says about that:
Use heading tags only for styling text and not presenting structure
