Google On SEO Impact Of URLs Injected Into HTML By CMS Platforms via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about a link to an internal web page that was automatically created by Squarespace, a closed-source platform. The link to the web page was also blocked from crawling by robots.txt, apparently serving no purpose for the Redditor’s client. The person asking the question was frustrated because the CMS didn’t allow editing to remove the link and was concerned about SEO issues caused by this rogue internal link.

Question About An Automatically Generated Internal URL

An SEO posted about this issue on Reddit while trying to fix technical issues for their client, including removing a link to a web page that the client had not intentionally created and that was automatically generated by the platform, which did not allow editing to remove the link.

Although the URL was blocked by robots.txt, Screaming Frog still detected internal links pointing to the web page, raising concern that Google would be able to find links to the web page.

They asked:

“Hi ya’ll-

I am resolving some high priority issues for my client and I have one last one. There is an internal URL blocked by the robots txt. My client uses Squarespace. The blocked page was not created by the client, but seems to be a spin off by squarespace looking like:

https://domain/categories/=59487a4cd1758e7669102174

The interesting thing, using Screaming Frog, I can find the inlinks to the page, but it’s hidden in an a href. I’ve found it via the developer tools, but I have no idea how to delete the link since SS doesn’t give access to the backend.

What the heck is going on and how do I resolve?”

Seemingly Random Platform-Generated Links Won’t Affect SEO

Google’s John Mueller responded that the URL and the links pointing to are not a search visibility issue. He recommended ignoring the links.

Mueller explained:

“It doesn’t really matter. I’d ignore it. It has no impact on search / SEO at all.

Some platforms just have links like that, if there’s nothing behind the link that you want indexed, there’s nothing you need to do. (And possibly, there might be nothing you can do if you’re on a hosted platform.)”

What Those Squarespace Links Really Are

Hosted CMS platforms control the underlying templates, routing systems, and JavaScript rendering process. That’s why URLs in Squarespace, like the one flagged by the user, cannot be edited because they’re part of the website’s internal architecture.

That URL is quite likely Squarespace’s internal URL identifier in its database. So rather than reference a URL in this way, category=shoes, it references it with the internal database identifier in this manner:

59487a4cd1758e7669102174

The ?format=json-pretty Trick

To see the underlying database IDs for any Squarespace-hosted website, just add ?format=json-pretty to the end of any URL, and Squarespace will stop rendering the visual web page and output the JSON-formatted code for that specific web page. This is a trick that Squarespace developers use.

Screenshot Of ?format=json-pretty Output

That way of doing things makes sense because the CMS system can use one internal canonical identifier for a category URL, and users can change it to whatever they want the URL to be. So no matter what a user chooses the category name to be, even if they change their mind, the internal database identifier stays the same.

Without knowing that information, it may look to an outsider as an instance of a closed source CMS restricting a user’s freedom, something that WordPress seemingly does not do. However, the reality is that Squarespace is providing the user with absolute freedom to name their categories whatever they choose them to be, and those uneditable URLs serve a purpose in making that happen.

WordPress does a similar thing as well with internal identifiers, only it’s more hidden away. WordPress uses a term_id for categories and tags, a post_id for posts, products, pages, and attachments. Sometimes you can see those term_id and post_id in the raw HTML that WordPress generates when you look into the source code, and just like with the now no longer mysterious Squarespace URLs, it is not anything that needs to be edited or removed for SEO purposes.

Technical SEO audits, including crawls with Screaming Frog, can turn up some weird-looking artifacts that are actually supposed to be there. Knowing how a CMS works helps an SEO and a site owner understand whether something weird really is weird and whether it is something that is 100% normal. Especially when working with a CMS that you’re not well acquainted with, it’s important to not make changes for SEO purposes before getting to know how the underlying CMS works. Many times, what isn’t well understood is actually something that is safe to leave alone, as Google’s John Mueller suggested.

As for setting up Screaming Frog for crawling a Squarespace site, it may be useful to set it to obey the Robots.txt or even manually adjust it to exclude certain pages from getting crawled.

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