Squarespace image CDN update [August 2019]

Update: As of August 28, 2019 it looks like Squarespace un-blocked the old image links and this issue no longer affects Google Merchant users.

You may have recently received an email from Google Merchant center about a problem with your image hosting configuration.

It looks like Squarespace updated the links where the images are hosted from static.squarespace.com to images.squarespace-cdn.com. On top of that Squarespace added a directive on the old image domains so that search engines won’t be able to access the old image URL paths.

The specific file that affects things is: https://static1.squarespace.com/robots.txt. And this is the directive in the file which blocks Google from accessing the image links:

Disallow: /static/

Unfortunately, no one except Squarespace has access to this file to make changes. You may want to reach out to Squarespace support and ask them to fix the issue, but in the meantime Squarefeed.io customers can solve the issue in a few simple steps (described below).

What does this mean for you?

In order to avoid interruptions in your Google merchant center or Facebook catalogs, you should update your product data in the feed. Here is how to do that:

  1. Log into your Squarespace admin panel and go to your website
  2. Edit the your browser’s address bar: delete everything after the “.com” part and replace it /api/1/commerce/products 
    (it should look something like this: https://your_site.squarespace.com/api/1/commerce/products)
  3. Right click anywhere on the page and click “Save as”
  4. Log into your Squarefeed.io account and upload the products file
  5. Go to Filed mapping & export, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Upload to Google Merchant” and then “Upload to Facebook Catalog”

If you’re having any issues please email our support.