How to Hide a Squarespace Page From Google & Other Search Engines

Hey everyone. I’m Galen from Local Creative Co. And in today’s video, we’re going to be talking about how to actually hide pages on your website from search engines like Google. But before we dive in YouTube analytics just told me that most of you who are watching this video right now have not yet subscribed to this channel. And making these videos is hard.

It takes a lot of effort. It is fun, but this is my second time trying to record this video all the way through. So, you appreciate all my hard work, and you want to watch more videos that I come out with in the future. Make sure to hit that, subscribe, that subscribe button, so you don’t miss a thing.

Most of you who are familiar with Squarespace, probably know about the not linked section in your page navigation. You’ve got your main navigation. Maybe you’ve got a footer navigation depending on which version of Squarespace you’re using. And then you’ve got that not linked section. And you might be assuming that anything you drop in that not linked section is hidden from the internet unless you link to it directly.

The problem is all of those pages are still visible to search engines like Google. And if you’re not careful, Google can crawl those pages and show them to people in search results.

You may be thinking that the more pages you have showing up in Google, the more likely people are to find your site, but some pages really aren’t meant to be indexed. For example, thank you pages, or even your link in bio page, which I have another video here I will link here all about how to create a link in bio page on Squarespace and why you should use Squarespace instead of something like Linktree or Canva.

That’s a different video again, linked, right here. But in general, you want to make sure that you only have pages ranking in search engines that actually add value to your site and are relevant for your ideal clients.

When Google looks at your website, they’re trying to determine how valuable your site is as a whole. And if you have all these extra pages in there, sometimes test pages or duplicated pages, or thank you pages or Instagram pages that aren’t really meant for people to find on their own.

If all of those are ranking in search, they’re going to lower the overall, the average quality of all the pages on your website. So, we want to make sure we’re hiding those pages from search engines, but how do you do that?

The good news is it’s super easy. You’re going to click the gear icon next to the page that you want to hide from search results, click on SEO settings and then scroll all the way down you are going to see a little toggle there that allows you to turn off indexing for that particular page. You can do this for any page on your Squarespace website.

You can also do this for entire blogs, although you definitely don’t want to do this for your main blog. This again is really reserved for pages that are sort of extra, again, test pages, thank you pages, anything along those lines that no one should really find unless you’re linking to it directly.

So, now I challenge you to go to your website, go through your not linked section and clean up any pages that you don’t need, as well as hide any pages that you think should be hidden from search results, and that could actually help improve your overall sites search engine rankings.

If you found this video helpful, let me know in the comments so, I can say hello. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure to subscribe and I’ll see you in the next video.