All Squarespace sites use the same robots.txt file and as a Squarespace user you cannot access or edit it. Squarespace have already specified the pages that should not be crawled by search engines because they’re for internal use only or display duplicate content. For example, /config/ is your Admin login page, and /api/ blocks the Analytics tracking cookie.
Here are some pages that Squarespace ask search engines not to crawl. These pages organize content that exists elsewhere on your site.
/search
/*?author=*
/*&author=*
/*?tag=*
/*&tag=*
/*?month=*
/*&month=*
/*?view=*
/*&view=*
/*?format=*
/*&format=*
/*?reversePaginate=*
/*&reversePaginate=*
For a complete list of the excluded pages, view the
robots.txt
file on any Squarespace website.
Me: I'm Paul, a SQSP user for >18 yrs &
Circle Leader
since 2017. I value honesty, transparency, diversity and good design ♥.
Work: Founder of
SF.DIGITAL
. We provide high quality original extensions to supercharge your Squarespace website.
Content: Views and opinions are my own. Links in my posts may refer to my own SF.DIGITAL products or may be affiliate links.
Forum advice is completely free. You can thank me by selecting a feedback emoji.
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We have detected a recent configuration change of the site hosting your images that result in the disapproval of some of your items in your Merchant Center account.
Since images are an important part of the rich product information shown in Shopping ads, we require that all items include a valid image that can be indexed by Google. We crawl the images you submit to Merchant Center every few weeks to ensure that users always see the most recent version. Our ability to crawl your images can be restricted with a robots.txt file, which might lead to the disapproval of affected items. Learn more about robots.txt by visiting
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608
.
What's the issue?
We have detected that a robots.txt file that controls the indexing of some of your provided images has been updated recently. As a result of these updates we aren't able to index the images of some of your items. This will result in the disapproval of the affected items.
Details and impact:
Estimated percentage of offers affected: 100
File:
http://www.workshopessentials.com/robots.txt
In order for us to access these images, please modify the robots.txt file mentioned above to allow the user-agent Googlebot-Image to index these images. You can do this by adding the following lines to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
If modifying this robots.txt file is not feasible you might want to consider hosting your images on a different hosting service that allows images to be indexed by Google.
Me: I'm Paul, a SQSP user for >18 yrs &
Circle Leader
since 2017. I value honesty, transparency, diversity and good design ♥.
Work: Founder of
SF.DIGITAL
. We provide high quality original extensions to supercharge your Squarespace website.
Content: Views and opinions are my own. Links in my posts may refer to my own SF.DIGITAL products or may be affiliate links.
Forum advice is completely free. You can thank me by selecting a feedback emoji.
Buying a coffee
is generous but optional.
Would you like your customers to be able to
mark their favourite products
in your Squarespace store?
Me: I'm Paul, a SQSP user for >18 yrs &
Circle Leader
since 2017. I value honesty, transparency, diversity and good design ♥.
Work: Founder of
SF.DIGITAL
. We provide high quality original extensions to supercharge your Squarespace website.
Content: Views and opinions are my own. Links in my posts may refer to my own SF.DIGITAL products or may be affiliate links.
Forum advice is completely free. You can thank me by selecting a feedback emoji.
Buying a coffee
is generous but optional.
Would you like your customers to be able to
mark their favourite products
in your Squarespace store?
As a webdeveloper of 14 years experience, I 100% disagree. A robots.txt is extremely important to SEO and given Squarespace has intimate knowledge of their own systems that it would be impossible for everyday users to know they should absolutely set the default robots.txt.
You need to have more trust in a company that literally creates and runs millions of website rather than some article you read online....context is key here. You get the benefit of their expertise, and essentially they are saving you from killing your SEO in 100s of different way by having a misconfigured robots.txt or missing configurations because you don't know all the paths Squarespace has available.
You have asked a lot of questions that if you don't know the answers already, you should not be making changes to a robots.txt and as you will ruin your website, despite what you think.
Ideally, having a section in the admin with sufficient warnings that allows a section that is appended to the default robots.txt could be good, but then again it would be a very advanced feature that user would need to understand some real important why and why nots to add pages there.
As a webdeveloper of 14 years experience, I 100% disagree. A robots.txt is extremely important to SEO and given Squarespace has intimate knowledge of their own systems that it would be impossible for everyday users to know they should absolutely set the default robots.txt.
You need to have more trust in a company that literally creates and runs millions of website rather than some article you read online....context is key here. You get the benefit of their expertise, and essentially they are saving you from killing your SEO in 100s of different way by having a misconfigured robots.txt or missing configurations because you don't know all the paths Squarespace has available.
You have asked a lot of questions that if you don't know the answers already, you should not be making changes to a robots.txt and as you will ruin your website, despite what you think.
Ideally, having a section in the admin with sufficient warnings that allows a section that is appended to the default robots.txt could be good, but then again it would be a very advanced feature that user would need to understand some real important why and why nots to add pages there.
I would have to disagree with you on this - I have worked in e-commerce and SEO for 15 years and being able to control your own robots.txt is a pretty essential functionality.
I'm not so interested on what Squarespace chooses to not index by default, I trust them on that too, but I have additional pages on my site that I want to be able to block from being indexed/crawled and as far as I can see I'm not able to define this and without robots access I don't have the power to.
There are many people out here using squarespace sites who aren't developers, but have a lot of web experience and do need to be able to manage the SEO of their sites properly. If Squarespace wants to claim to be a good platform for SEO then they need to be providing the tools for businesses to make that happen.
I've worked with many major e-commerce and web platforms and consider access to this to be a very standard feature these days.
Me: I'm Paul, a SQSP user for >18 yrs &
Circle Leader
since 2017. I value honesty, transparency, diversity and good design ♥.
Work: Founder of
SF.DIGITAL
. We provide high quality original extensions to supercharge your Squarespace website.
Content: Views and opinions are my own. Links in my posts may refer to my own SF.DIGITAL products or may be affiliate links.
Forum advice is completely free. You can thank me by selecting a feedback emoji.
Buying a coffee
is generous but optional.
Would you like your customers to be able to
mark their favourite products
in your Squarespace store?
A 301 redirect is not an appropriate solution here because the old URLs are spammy content caused by a hack of the old website. Squarespace does not offer an option to set a 410 server response on an individual URL level either (another feature Squarespace should absolutely offer to site administrators).
@paul2009
or anyone here, I wonder if you might be able to help? Im out of my league with Robots.txt suddenly my site and all of its pages appear to be blocked on google due to a Rotots.txt setting ...and I have ZERO idea why. I've not done anything new, not installed any strange code, and am, at a loss ...
Any help would be tremendously appreciated
🙂
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