Google Indexing
Will the Substack gods allow it?
Substack places a noindex meta tag in your posts
A few years ago, I was trying out both Medium and Substack in order to decide which one I wanted to use to post my film reviews. During my testing, I discovered that both of them were adding a noindex meta tag to every post, which would block Google from indexing your posts.
So, I emailed both of them to ask why this was, and if they would remove it from my account so that I could post my film reviews to be indexed by Google. I was told that this was to prevent spam / black hat accounts from spreading garbage on Google. Further, they both claim that they will remove the noindex tag after a short time when they find out that you are not a spammer.
I had already had both of these accounts for years, so I’m not sure why they hadn’t already removed them. I pointed this out to both of them, and asked that it be removed from my respective accounts.
Medium responded by removing the noindex meta tags from my posts. Great!
Substack? They ignored me. So here we are, several years later, and they still have not removed this roadblock.
How many years will it take Substack to respond and remove the noindex meta tag from my posts? Find out right here, probably in a few years.
Update!
May 20, 2025: Substack has removed the noindex meta tag from this post. I can only assume this means it will be removed from my account and all posts going forward. Years of ignoring my formal request, and the thing that got it removed was posting an article about it. Regardless of mine being fixed, this is still an issue that plagues every other user of the platform. Make sure you check on this in your own accounts.
How do you check? Here’s how to do it in Windows:
Go to one of your articles.
Right Click > Inspect
Hit CTRL-F to open the search, then type “noindex”. If it finds an instance of the word “noindex”, they are blocking your account from being indexed by google.