37 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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Rakgan Sukhagen'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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Rakgan Sukhagen'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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Burk's avatar

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

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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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Where To Watch'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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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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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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Shabnam Nasimi's avatar

Thank you! This has been helpful. Mine has been verified via Google Tag Manager, and I've set up Sitmaps.

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Samir's avatar

Does it work only if you have a custom domain?

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Burk's avatar

No. Others have got it working without a custom domain.

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Samir's avatar

It's working now, thank you!

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Bess Stillman's avatar

Both failed. Is there anything I need to do once I copy the correct codes into Substack?

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Burk's avatar

Sometimes it takes a day. Sometimes trying it again works. I don’t know what it is. Heard that from a few people.

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Bess Stillman's avatar

Thanks! Was able to get one to work but not the other but still- success! Thanks so much

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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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Andrei Gogiu's avatar

Just did mine now. Thank you for this!

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