A Survival Guide to SEO for Blogs and Bilingual Blogging

Which blogging platform to choose? I use both Substack and Ghost and there are decision to be made as both offer very different paths as to how your work is found online.

Why not Wordpress? You can build anything with Wordpress, but for blogging I prefer these two platforms. One comes with a community, the other is very fast and has a great writing interface.

I'll be looking at how both platforms deal with SEO. I have also done a case study showing the SEO changes I made to a page which moved it from page 2 on Google results to page 1. I have written about protecting your online writing here. I talk about setting up a bilingual blog in this post - A guide to bilingual blogging.

In this post:

• How to choose between Substack and Ghost
• Can I redirect old urls on Substack?
• The Google Crawl Budget
• Can I use custom code in Substack?
• Using Cloudflare with Substack to save money
• A positive take on Substack

How to choose between Substack and Ghost

Substack is great for many things, there is an audience for writers and a sense of community. There's also some really great writing to be found on it, really great. It is fantastic as far as email newsletter delivery goes. It does lots of things well, I love writing on it.

I use mainly Substack and Ghost to blog on. (Wordpress I think it's fair to say, is a website builder now rather than a blogging platform.) I'll be referring to them both here.

But Substack is first and foremost an email newsletter platform, it presents some difficulties regarding SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

I understand that Substack takes a view on some things in order to make the overall experience better for readers. For example, if there were thousands of stray URLs, it's good they avoid people landing on blank missing page 404 errors all the time.

The Substack issues have been compounded for me in that I write a bilingual blog - www.gaelic.blog. I guess I have had to learn the hard way about any workarounds on Substack for this. And sometimes, there are no workarounds. One just have to accept that it'll never be optimal. And maybe that's actually ok. But there are some things to look out for which will save you time.

There is also a big question regarding the balance of discoverability - and how much one wants to allow AI models from using your writing to train LLMs. There are ways to mitigate it, but it's something to think about.

A lot of people advise to start writing online where there is an audience already, and there is truth in that. It allows people to find your work a lot easier. Places like LinkedIn, Medium and so on. Substack is excellent for this.

However, if you want people to find you on Google and to go up the rankings, Ghost is probably better. It is faster and more customisable. The trade-off though, is that there is no built-in audience. You're having to do all that yourself, so it is much slower than Substack as regards building subscriber numbers.

So what are the SEO issues with Substack?

Can I redirect old URLs on Substack?

No. You can't. And this is a problem.

So a url is the name of say the website page that someone is visiting on your site -like yourdomain/mygreatpost. As we're getting up to speed, learning about how to use Substack, it's natural to write posts that we then delete. Or we might set up a whole section or podcast, but then change strategy.

In some platforms, you have control over this redirection process, You can point a URL you don't need anymore to one you do.

Substack's system of 'soft redirects'

In Substack, they do a kind of soft redirect themselves, so any missing pages take people to your archive section. This is good for the reader experience - no big 'No Page Found Error 404' screens. (A 404 error just means that Google can't find the page to deliver it to you.)

However, it confuses Google. When I look on my Google Search Console, I have pages which are both classed as redirected and missing. (You can find this info in 'settings' at the bottom left, then 'crawl stats' and 'open report'.)

And I can't do anything about them except let them fade away. Normally this is a natural process but because of what I've mentioned here, it really drags on. And it has repurcussions.

The Google Crawl Budget

Google is like a pedantic uncle in charge of an enormous library who is pushed for time to get his Saab to the garage. He just doesn't have much time to spend on you.

And if you make it hard for him, in this case wandering around dead ends looking at pages that don't exist (broken links), looking at pages that don't connect to anything, on a very slow website, well... he's got better things to do. He's got to go and look at the trout your other uncle Frank caught.

So in the literature they say that Google has no problem crawling and indexing all existing websites, so that's good. And it also says that a website isn't penalised for being slow, if the content is good.

I have seen, though, a big difference in the amount of crawl visits between an active site and a dormant one. And especially, in the time it takes to get a page indexed. When you're writing every day on a site, it can be very quick getting indexed, a case of minutes.

So it's not black and white, but having a site in good order for SEO does help.

Why Google might not want to waste crawl budget on you

The wandering about is what Google calls crawling. And they decide how much attention to give you based on things like, how often do you post. Does your content show Experience - Expertise - Authoritativeness - Trustworthiness?

Or are you sucking the soul out of the little google robot's body as your site is a hot mess of broken links and missing pages?

So in short, try not to create web pages in Substack and then just delete them. Try and re-use the url. In your crawl stats go to 'by response' and 'no found' and you'll see the pages that Google visits and finds nothing.

Can I use custom code in Substack?

No, you can't.

I think it's worth writers learning to get used to being able to copy little bits of code from reliable sources and then pasting them into the relevant spot which is happy to take it on your website back-end. If you don't like the results, you can delete it.

In Ghost, there is a way to add custom code in the settings and it is very simple and handy.

For example, you might want to use Plausible Analytics, for cleaner stats on site visits than Google Analytics. (Plausible does cost a bit though, but it is excellent for reader privacy.)

But as you can't add a wee bits of code on Substack, you can't do it. It really limits what you can do regarding SEO. You can't do redirects either, so old pages with 404 Missing Page errors just hang around, using up your Google Crawl budget.

Using Cloudflare with Substack to save money

I think talking about this set-up deserves another post, I started writing about it but it's turtles all the way down.

Cloudflare is a great tool. It's like a high-tech shield that sits between your website and the rest of the internet. It gives you some protection from bots, increases security and makes your website faster.

A lot of people use it when setting up a Substack custom domain as it takes care of the DNS setting - the is how your website is found on the internet. And it saves money on having to take out more hosting.

With Substack, a lot of its capabilities are wasted, even though the saving money thing is good. In short, my point is that even Cloudflare doesn't help get over the issues with Substack, like not being able to redirect urls etc. And it doesn't help with bots visiting your site and inflating your Google Analytics stats. And it's unfortunate you can't use Cloudflare's facility to prevent AI bots using your writing for training.

To do this, you'd have to set the proxy setting to on in Cloudflare, but this causes other problems which will waste too much of your one precious life.

A positive take on Substack

So possibly Substack isn't the best place for SEO or a bilingual newsletter in some ways.

But on the other hand, the community of readers makes up for it. They are generous. Your work, whatever it is, will find an audience.

And it comes down to the question - who are you writing for? Is the aim to maximise page ranking (which is valid if you are, say, a business), or is it to feel free to express yourself and develop your writing craft. You read your favourite blogs because you love the writing. These tips are just to try and help people to find your great writing.

So while it's good to be aware of issues one might run into, it's also good to keep the eyes on the prize. And the pedal to the metal. If you do both, there'll be no stopping you.

And as for Ghost, well, it was created by a team of ex-Wordpress employees who wanted to go back to a purer vision of a website for blogging. They have achieved that in spades. it's a great writing interface, simple admin settings, lots of easy shortcuts for what you need and fast as anything.