I had to check on Google and I'm good. Its nice to learn more how we can branch our substack out for new engagement. I started not long ago so its exciting to see how things go. Thanks for the read.
"In that case, you wouldn’t even be reading this…your majesty." This made me lol. Thank you for putting this guide together! Great to understand how Google crawlers work for indexing, and also TIL that commenting with a link gets flagged!
On a separate note, do you have any advice on how to get comfortable promoting? Or are there Substack newsletters you recommend that share tips on how to promote your craft? This is the part I find the biggest bottleneck in getting backlinks...
You can get advice by participating in "on substack" office hours where you will find a few newsletter authors dedicated to promoting online (some offer paid services), see https://on.substack.com/s/office-hours
I recommend engaging with other relevant writers and writing through comments and notes, I often look at the work of those who leave comments on my pages. You can link your work (occasionally) in comments when referring to it, people still can click on it, it just doesn't help your visibility on Google. The main bottleneck is the time this all takes and the patience needed. Write for yourself first.
I am indexed - I already knew that, but I decided to google part of the title of one of my posts. About the 70th result.. that could use some improvement!
My website is not indexed, and from all the articles that I have published, only one is indexed. I've written more than thirty! Do you have any idea why? Is it common an article to be indexed whereas the website itself not to be indexed?
The simple answer is Google hasn't found those pages yet. Substack doesn't push your posts to Google, you have to either wait for google to organically find your pages or manually request indexing yourself. Yes Google can index one of your pages without crawling any of your other pages.
Follow my guide in part 2 to get the ball rolling on Google’s Search Console. Your site has a sitemap so you can send a link to this (https://iamlazaros.substack.com/sitemap.xml) as I describe in that article. This can be a bit of frustrating process which is why I wrote this series.
I have been asking Substack for 3 weeks now to activate my sitemap. Their support bot is telling me it is a bug.
I can't submit my blog to google until I have the sitemap to do so. Any ideas? I can't seem to escalte this with Substack. I've evened reachd out to their CEO on Linked In!!
Substack is a bit oblique about when sitemaps are generated. In the meantime you can submit individual posts/pages to Google for indexing. For details on how to do this see my article part 2.
So far so good. I have submited 7 posts to Google manually and they seem to be getting indexed. already. But...not google is blocking me from submitting anymore.
I have now getting "Sorry--we couldn't process this request because you've exceeded your daily quota. Please try submitting this again tomorrow."
This was Thursday. I have tried again today and I am still getting the same message.
It is so frustrating! Do you have any ideas on how to resolve this?
Nothing wrong your end. Google puts a limit on manual submissions for around a week before removing the quota. Probably it's to stop robots/spammy sites clogging the system. If your site doesn't get flagged it's just a frustrating waiting game.
I had to check on Google and I'm good. Its nice to learn more how we can branch our substack out for new engagement. I started not long ago so its exciting to see how things go. Thanks for the read.
"In that case, you wouldn’t even be reading this…your majesty." This made me lol. Thank you for putting this guide together! Great to understand how Google crawlers work for indexing, and also TIL that commenting with a link gets flagged!
On a separate note, do you have any advice on how to get comfortable promoting? Or are there Substack newsletters you recommend that share tips on how to promote your craft? This is the part I find the biggest bottleneck in getting backlinks...
Hi Yina
You can get advice by participating in "on substack" office hours where you will find a few newsletter authors dedicated to promoting online (some offer paid services), see https://on.substack.com/s/office-hours
I recommend engaging with other relevant writers and writing through comments and notes, I often look at the work of those who leave comments on my pages. You can link your work (occasionally) in comments when referring to it, people still can click on it, it just doesn't help your visibility on Google. The main bottleneck is the time this all takes and the patience needed. Write for yourself first.
I am indexed - I already knew that, but I decided to google part of the title of one of my posts. About the 70th result.. that could use some improvement!
Hey Melissa,
If you want to optimize based on titles be sure to read part 3 on my guide here: https://boodsy.substack.com/p/get-your-substack-on-google-stand-out
Thank you, this is so useful!
Ah-Ha! finally! :-) someone that makes sense. This has been so helpful. You're my hero! Thanks you
Thanks Chris! Glad to be of help. Thanks for the sub and pointing out the typo. 😎
My website is not indexed, and from all the articles that I have published, only one is indexed. I've written more than thirty! Do you have any idea why? Is it common an article to be indexed whereas the website itself not to be indexed?
Hey Lazaros,
The simple answer is Google hasn't found those pages yet. Substack doesn't push your posts to Google, you have to either wait for google to organically find your pages or manually request indexing yourself. Yes Google can index one of your pages without crawling any of your other pages.
Follow my guide in part 2 to get the ball rolling on Google’s Search Console. Your site has a sitemap so you can send a link to this (https://iamlazaros.substack.com/sitemap.xml) as I describe in that article. This can be a bit of frustrating process which is why I wrote this series.
Cool! Thank you:)
I have been asking Substack for 3 weeks now to activate my sitemap. Their support bot is telling me it is a bug.
I can't submit my blog to google until I have the sitemap to do so. Any ideas? I can't seem to escalte this with Substack. I've evened reachd out to their CEO on Linked In!!
Hey Alan,
Substack is a bit oblique about when sitemaps are generated. In the meantime you can submit individual posts/pages to Google for indexing. For details on how to do this see my article part 2.
Yeah very oblique. I was thinking of setting up a proxy to do it. Which seemed overkill.
I've read your Part 2 - I was looking for something like that, and couldn't work out how to do it. Many thanks. I will submit pages individually.
So far so good. I have submited 7 posts to Google manually and they seem to be getting indexed. already. But...not google is blocking me from submitting anymore.
I have now getting "Sorry--we couldn't process this request because you've exceeded your daily quota. Please try submitting this again tomorrow."
This was Thursday. I have tried again today and I am still getting the same message.
It is so frustrating! Do you have any ideas on how to resolve this?
Nothing wrong your end. Google puts a limit on manual submissions for around a week before removing the quota. Probably it's to stop robots/spammy sites clogging the system. If your site doesn't get flagged it's just a frustrating waiting game.
Sure thing. I will back off until the end of the week and then take it from there.
Thanks for your help!
The same