21 Comments
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Wyndo's avatar

Love this! I’ve setup my console but turns out there are other things I need to do to maximize it, thanks!

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Sufyan Maan, M.Eng's avatar

Thanks for sharing these detailed insights, Colin

I will update everything on the weekend as you suggested. Thanks

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Salvador Lorca 📚 ⭕️'s avatar

Very good insight about seo. Can i translate last part of this article into Spanish with links to you and a description of your newsletter?

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Colin Gardiner's avatar

Of course! Thanks for asking.

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Salvador Lorca 📚 ⭕️'s avatar

And very impressed by this article:

https://www.gardinercolin.com/p/why-is-marketplace-revenue-so-funky

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olayanjuidris's avatar

I read your article and I am blown away

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Colin Gardiner's avatar

🙏

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Jens Stark's avatar

Could you please clarify the how to verify ownership of the Substack sub-domain for the Google Search console? I want to copy and paste the meta tag into the analytics section in settings as you suggested, but which is the appropriate field to drop this into?

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Anitha Bellary's avatar

I dont see Google site verification row in My Substack Analytic setting. So I am unable to past the the meta HTML content. Any reason why I dont have it in my Substack settings?

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Evelyn So (Thinker & Co.)'s avatar

I have the same problem and would like further instructions, thank you!

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Jens Stark's avatar

Hey Evelyn, I've managed to find a complementary source of info for this. DM me and I'll share, as I don't want to link away from Colin's content.

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Tom Scott's avatar

@Emily

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Bougie Tech Dad's avatar

Hi Colin. Very helpful post. Thank you. I created a substack in January and haven’t seen a sitemap.xml file yet. From what I’m reading in Reddit and similar spots, substack may have stopped providing the files (perhaps related to the fact that google is leaning so hard into their ‘AI generated search results’, which is a major shift for SEO because it basically has stopped driving traffic to sites. )

But that’s a whole other conversation.

A workaround that I just did was the following:

1) Substack still creates an RSS feed for you.

2) So just go to yoursubstack.substack.com/feed and you can download the file

3) if you’re not into coding, you can upload that .rss file into ChatGPT and ask it to convert it to a sitemap.xml file.

4) you can then upload that file to the search console.

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Cassandra Day's avatar

Hi Colin, thank you for your article. I don't believe that the Google Search Console works anymore. I tried your steps and it looks like SubStack no longer allows this option.

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Digital society's avatar

Thanks for this guide! The best practice is share overall, good job for the SEO tips in Substack in this case, knowledges of SEO nice. Lear how to work the SEO here and it's of many help for understand the evosystem with other platforms for growth. Remembering the times of Community Manager, actualised, best practices in the moment a long of time the crawlers change "Index, Keywords, links, back link...." Recommend this publication.

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Carrie Loranger's avatar

This is the best thing I’ve read on Substack this week. Thank you so much for sharing this information!

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Jody Gates's avatar

Hey Colin,

I've followed steps and shared this in and few places. It's a great resource and I appreciate you sharing it.

While I'll admit I haven't tried to resolve it yet on my own, I did get an email from Google saying the robots.txt file blocked their crawl... your post mentions it as a known issue, but doesn't actually say how to resolve the issue in your post. Is it just a'bummer dude' problem if it occurs?

Thanks!

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Bryan Collins's avatar

SEO is a much harder play for creators these days

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Wendy Scott's avatar

Thanks, I'm going to implement. Have subscribed :-)

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Anfernee's avatar

Thanks for this informative post! Going to implement them!

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