61 Comments
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Dustin Arand's avatar

I did both the Google Analytics and Tag Manager options, but it still failed to verify. Any ideas?

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OntheRoad's avatar

Same boat.

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Burk's avatar

Hm. Maybe they changed something. What’s the error message

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Giraffe Healing Fire's avatar

I had these issues as well, but checked back the next day and it worked :)

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Ali 🏝's avatar

I have a few pieces of content indexed on Google’s first page, but Reddit has been a game changer for me.

A little hack you can do is use Reddit to distribute your Substack content, since Reddit ranks pretty high on Search.

I’ve been doing this for the past 2 years and still to this day I’m getting traffic from Google->Reddit->Substack. 😊

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Burk's avatar

Yes that’s a good point. Reddit is underrated

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Catania Larson's avatar

How did you do this? Post in a specific subreddit? Start one? Just wondering what the process looks like.

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Ali 🏝's avatar

Yeah, I post in subreddits related to my target market/audience (expats, freelancers, etc) and I also promote in comments of posts that are indexed on Google or that are starting to ‘take off’.

I write a short eBook on the topic if you’re interested: https://thetanweerali.gumroad.com/l/grow-business-reddit?referrer=https://www.substack.com

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BK Anderson's avatar

I got 1 of 2 .substack verified. So it working for non-custom domains. I FOllowed your steps as written, but the verification process returned errors. Since I knew all the codes were input correctly, i planned on waiting for up to 24 hours, thinking that site cache and sync needed time to do its thing in the background. And it did after about 2 hours. When I returned to check website console again, it verified automatically.

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Burk's avatar

Could be cache. I remember running into that error a year ago as well.

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BK Anderson's avatar

Good news is that both subs are verified. But is there anything we can do to ensure Google indexes all pages? Or is it good practice to submit request for indexing pages anyway?

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Burk's avatar

I’d wait a bit to let Google crawl. Then you could request indexing.

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Pablo Naboso's avatar

I am very surprised. I did all these things in old times when I run my own standalone Wordpress-based blog. I moved to substack precisely for this reason: to stop dealing with google analytics and all the other administrative activities that took my time away from writing. I imagined that substack was doing all this for me. Is it possible that our content is actually not being already registered for google indexing (by substack automatic mechanisms)? Why wouldn’t it? This seems like bread and butter for blogging platform like substack, and the most basic functionality that they should be focusing on. After all, they make a living from our blogs and the fact that people outside substack are able to find that content.

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Burk's avatar

In theory it should be automatic.

For me, it was important because I use a custom domain

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LaLa ✿Indie Maker✿'s avatar

Are there any differences to this if you're using your own domain

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Meera Menon's avatar

Thank you do much, it is really helpful and double thanks for the steps, I thought, it only worked for normal blogger blogs, not substack. But I dont have custom domain on substack yet.

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The Version News's avatar

Great article

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J Packer Samms • Cats's avatar

This is incredibly helpful! Thank you!!

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Mark O'Keefe's avatar

I appreciate this article. When I wrote on Medium, over 90% of my traffic came from Google, but I have gotten very little traffic since coming to Substack a couple of months ago. Maybe this will change that.

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Stephon Anderson's avatar

Yes! I've been trying to figure this out for weeks! Thank you so much for simplifying it.

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Rich Dornisch 🏳️‍🌈's avatar

This is great info, thank you for sharing!!!

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Nicholas Penrake's avatar

Couldn't get anywhere with Google Analytics. The Tag Manager seemed to work, though. Thanks.

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SEArcularity's avatar

Does it work only if you have your own custom domain?

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Burk's avatar

Yeah I suspect it does only work on custom now.

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HJ Zhou's avatar

Read through and followed instructions from start to finish - so clearly written and useful. Thank you for sharing!

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Evan Bourcier's avatar

Yesterday I went through both the analytics and tag manager process, and as of 24 hours later they are both still failing the console verification - any ideas here?

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Burk's avatar

I’ve heard that from some people. Sometimes it took a little longer. Others said it worked when they tried it again. Not sure what it is.

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Andrew Eroh's avatar

Oh that's a great idea.

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Danielle's avatar

I would love to try this. Total newbie question: Does doing this enable AI to have greater access to my Substack?

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Burk's avatar

I don’t think so. You can restrict AI access in the Substack settings.

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Danielle's avatar

I definitely have that set up.

Thanks so much for your reply ☺️

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