Skip to content
50% OFF $299 $599
Lock in
§ 2.2.4 ARTICLE
Published VerifiedEvery 6 weeks Sources4 named Authored bySquareRank Team

Indexing · § 2.2.4 · Diagnostic

Crawl errors in Search Console, Squarespace edition

Search Console's Pages report groups indexing issues into named status categories1. The five that show up most often on a Squarespace site, in rough order of frequency: Discovered - currently not indexed (Google knows the URL but hasn't crawled it yet), Crawled - currently not indexed (crawled but Google chose not to index), Soft 404 (page returns 200 but reads as not-found), Server error (5xx) (Squarespace returned a 500-class error), and Duplicate, Google chose different canonical (canonical confusion across pages). Each has a Squarespace-specific cause and fix.

This leaf decodes each status with the Squarespace cause, the fix, and the validation step. The diagnose flow at the end walks through the order in which to address them on a typical small-business site.

What the Pages report in Search Console actually shows

Search Console's Pages report is the canonical view of which URLs on your site Google has discovered, crawled, and indexed — and the reasons URLs are not indexed. The report groups URLs by status, with each status row showing a count and a clickable link to inspect the affected URLs. The headline number is 'Indexed' vs 'Not indexed'; the diagnostic value is in the status groups under 'Not indexed', where each named status maps to a different root cause.

Google's Pages report documentation1 describes every status the report can return. The most common five on a typical Squarespace site cover 90%+ of crawl errors most owners encounter. The remaining statuses (Blocked by robots.txt, Blocked due to access denied, Indexed but blocked by robots.txt, Page with redirect, etc.) appear rarely on Squarespace because the platform's default robots.txt is permissive.

What the Pages report can tell you

Status

every status group has a documented cause and fix in Google's canonical Pages report help.

Google · 2025-12-10
Sample

Search Console samples up to 1,000 URLs per status; if your site has more, the sample is representative.

Google · 2025-12-10
URL tool

URL Inspection is the per-URL deep-dive — last crawl date, render mode, canonical, indexing state.

Google · 2025-12-10

'Discovered - currently not indexed'

Google knows the URL exists (usually via your sitemap or an inbound link), but hasn't crawled it yet. The page is queued for crawling at Google's priority, which on a new or low-authority site can mean weeks or months of delay. Three causes on Squarespace: the site is too new, crawl budget for the domain is fully allocated, or the page is buried deep in the site structure with no internal links. Fix by building internal links to the page, requesting indexing via URL Inspection, and earning external links over time.

The honest scope: this status is normal on new sites. A brand-new Squarespace site with 30 pages typically has 5-15 in “Discovered - not indexed” for the first 2-4 weeks. Google's index slowly works through the queue. The status becomes a problem only when it persists for months on pages you specifically want indexed — in which case the fix is usually internal linking and content quality rather than any platform setting.

'Crawled - currently not indexed'

Google crawled the page, parsed the content, and decided not to add it to the index. Two causes on Squarespace: (1) thin content that Google judged not useful enough to index, and (2) near-duplicate content that Google chose to index a different version of (the canonical leaf covers the duplicate case). The fix for the thin-content case is improving content — more depth, original analysis, structured data. The fix for the duplicate case is auditing internal links and canonical signals to point Google at the version you prefer.

A small-business Squarespace site with this status on several pages often has a content-quality issue, not a technical issue. Pages that get this status are often homepages of competitors, copy-paste service descriptions, or thin blog posts. Google's documentation2 describes the status as "a quality signal" — the page exists, Google looked at it, Google chose not to index it.

Soft 404 errors

A soft 404 is a page that returns 200 OK at the HTTP level but reads as 'not found' to Google's content classifiers. The most common Squarespace cause: the platform's default 404 page returns 200 instead of 404 in some configurations. Custom 'page not found' pages built without the proper HTTP status code can produce this. The fix is usually template-level — either configure the 404 page correctly, or ensure pages that exist actually have content (a published page with one line of text can trigger soft 404).

Soft 404 is uncommon on a typical Squarespace site because the platform usually handles 404 responses correctly. When it appears, the URL Inspection tool is the diagnostic — it shows what Google sees when it fetches the page and explains why the content reads as not-found. If the page is intentionally a 404, mark it explicitly noindex. If the page should exist with content, add the content.

Server errors (5xx) on Squarespace

A server error means Squarespace returned a 500-class HTTP status when Google tried to crawl the page. On a hosted platform like Squarespace, 5xx errors are almost always transient — the platform was briefly unreachable or the specific page hit an internal error. The fix: usually nothing on your end. Re-crawl typically succeeds within hours. If 5xx persists, contact Squarespace support — the platform is responsible for serving pages correctly, and persistent 5xx is a platform incident.

The diagnostic for persistent 5xx: open the page in a browser. If the page loads fine for you, the 5xx in Search Console was transient and will resolve on re-crawl. If the page itself returns a 500 in your browser too, that's a Squarespace bug and worth a support ticket. The pages most prone to 5xx in field tests are heavy Commerce product pages with many variants, complex galleries, and pages with multiple embedded third-party widgets.

'Duplicate, Google chose different canonical' on Squarespace

This status means Google found multiple URLs serving similar content and consolidated them into a single canonical — and chose a different URL than the one you declared as canonical. Two common Squarespace causes: trailing-slash vs no-trailing-slash duplicates (the platform serves both, Google sometimes picks the 'wrong' one), and pages where the Site Description fallback caused near-identical content across multiple pages. The fix is consistent internal linking to the preferred URL and improving content uniqueness.

Google's canonical documentation4 notes that rel=canonical is a hint, not a directive — Google can choose a different canonical when other signals are strong. The Squarespace pattern: open the affected URL in the URL Inspection tool, read the "Google-selected canonical" field, decide whether Google's choice is acceptable. If it is, no action needed. If it isn't, audit internal links and the canonical leaf in the SEO panel cluster.

The diagnose flow, in order

Work through the Pages report top-down by URL count. If 'Discovered - not indexed' has 50 URLs and 'Crawled - not indexed' has 3, fix the bigger category first — the impact is proportional to the URL count. For each status, click into the URL list, sample 3-5 URLs, run URL Inspection on each, identify the common cause. Apply the fix to that cause across all affected URLs. Validate the fix in Search Console. Wait 1-3 weeks. Re-check.

The diagnose pattern is rarely "one URL with one bug" — it's usually "many URLs with the same systemic cause." Fixing the cause once resolves all the URLs at once. The diagnose leaf in this cluster walks through the full eight-step flow for the broader "site not indexed" question; this leaf handles the per-status decoding when Search Console already has the property verified.

Keep reading · § 2.2.4