Google On SEO Impact Of URLs Injected Into HTML Through CMS Platforms
John Mueller of Google answered a question on Reddit about a link to an internal web page automatically generated by Squarespace, a closed source platform. The link to the web page is also blocked from searching by robots.txt, which apparently serves no purpose in the Redditor client. The person asking the question is frustrated because the CMS did not allow the editor to remove the link and is worried about the SEO problems caused by this bad internal link.
Question About Auto Generated Internal URL
The SEO posted about this issue on Reddit while trying to fix their client’s technical issues, including removing a link to a webpage the client didn’t create on purpose and which was automatically generated by the platform, which doesn’t allow editing to remove the link.
Even though the URL was blocked by robots.txt, Screaming Frog still identified internal links pointing to the webpage, raising concerns that Google would be able to find the links to the webpage.
They asked:
“Hello, I’m going to-
I am solving some very important problems for my client and I have a last one. There is an internal URL blocked by txt for robots. My client uses Squarespace. The blocked page was not created by the client, but it appears to be Squarespace which looks like this:
Interesting thing, using Screaming Frog, I can get the links to the page, but it’s hidden in the href. I got it through developer tools, but I don’t know how to remove the link since SS doesn’t give you access to the background.
What happened and how do I solve it?”
Seemingly Random Site-Generated Links Won’t Affect SEO
Google’s John Mueller responded that URLs and hyperlinks are not a search visibility issue. Recommended to ignore links.
Mueller explained:
“It doesn’t really matter. I can ignore it. It doesn’t affect search / SEO at all.
Some platforms have links like that, if there is nothing behind the link you want listed, you don’t need to do anything. (And maybe, there might be something you can do if you’re hosted.)”
What exactly are those squarespace links
Hosted CMS platforms manage basic templates, routing systems, and the JavaScript rendering process. That’s why Squarespace URLs, like those tagged by a user, can’t be edited because they’re part of the website’s internal structure.
That URL is probably a reference to Squarespace’s internal URL on its website. So instead of referring to the URL like this, category=shoes, it refers to it with an internal database identifier like this:
59487a4cd1758e7669102174
The ?format=json-pretty Trick
To see the basic database IDs of any website hosted by Squarespace, simply add ?format=json-pretty to the end of any URL, and Squarespace will stop rendering the virtual web page and output the JSON-formatted code for that particular web page. This is a trick used by Squarespace developers.
Screenshot of ?format=json-pretty Output
That approach makes sense because the CMS system can use one internal canonical identifier for the category URL, and users can change it to whatever they want the URL to be. So no matter what the user chooses to name the section, even if they change their mind, the internal database identifier doesn’t change.
Without knowing that information, it might look to an outsider like an example of a closed source CMS that limits user freedom, something WordPress doesn’t seem to do. However, the truth is that Squarespace provides the user with complete freedom to name their categories whatever they choose to be, and those uneditable URLs serve the purpose of making that happen.
WordPress does the same thing with internal identifiers, only more hidden. WordPress uses term_id for categories and tags, post_id for posts, products, pages, and attachments. Sometimes you can see those term_id and post_id in the raw HTML generated by WordPress if you look at the source code, and like Squarespace’s URLs are now obscure, it’s not something that needs to be edited or removed for SEO purposes.
Technical SEO testing, including crawling with a screaming frog, can turn up weird-looking artifacts that shouldn’t be there. Knowing how a CMS works helps the SEO and site owner to understand what is really weird and whether it is 100% normal. Especially if you are working with a CMS that you are not familiar with, it is important not to make changes for SEO purposes before knowing how the underlying CMS works. Often times, what is misunderstood is actually something that is safe to leave alone, as Google’s John Mueller has suggested.
As for setting up Screaming Frog to crawl the Squarespace site, it may help to set it to listen to Robots.txt or even manually configure it to exclude certain pages from the search.
Featured image by Shutterstock/xpixel
