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Wonderful points and advice, thank you Bridget!

I was prompted to write a response to this article today after helping a friend look into her Squarespace site.  It's not like I expected it to have the equivalent of Wordpress' amazing Yoast SEO plugin, but I was at least expecting some nice control over metadata.

However, I discovered users have almost no control over the Title or Meta Description tags on the individual page level.

I even tweeted at SquareSpace support, and they admitted it was not an option yet (at least of 9/2/2016): https://twitter.com/SquarespaceHelp/status/771819238101176320

Right now, you can only add custom titles and descriptions on what Squarespace calls "pages" - but beware, not all pages are created equal.  Blog posts are not pages. Neither are e-commerce products.  My friend wanted to optimize her product page title tags, but she can't.  So disappointing.

Fingers crossed that SquareSpace updates their CMS to maybe allow for this someday....

BACKGROUND:

We are developing a new multi-language website that is going to have:

1. Multiple directories for various languages:
/en-us, /de, etc....
2. Hreflang tags
3. Universal footer links so user can select their preferred language.
and
4. Automatic JS detection of location on homepage only, so that when the user lands on /, it redirect them to the correct location.

Currently, the auto JS detection only happens on /, and no other pages of the website. The user can also always choose to override the auto-detection on the homepage anytime, by using the language-selector links on the bottom.

QUESTION: Should we try to place a 301 on / to point to en/us? Someone recommended this to us, but my thinking is "NO" - we do NOT want to 301 /.  Instead, I feel like we should allow Google Access to /, because that is also the most authoritative page on the website and where all incoming links are pointing.  In most cases, users / journalists / publications IMHO are just going to link to /, not dilly dally around with the language-directory.

My hunch is just to keep / as is, but also work to help Google understand the relationship between all of the different language-specific directories.  I know that Google officially doesn't advocate meta refresh redirects, but this only happens on homepage, and we likewise allow user to override this at any time (and again, universal footer links will point both search engines and users to all other locations.)

Thoughts?  Thanks for any tips/feedback!

OH MY GOD.  It was so hard to find.  Thanks for enlightening me.

A common question from anxious webmasters who have separate/smaller mobile websites is:  _"Will Google move my site over to mobile-first, even though I'm not "ready" yet?" _It's not an easy question to answer.  Here's what we know so far:

• Google is currently already migrating websites over that have a strong correlation between mobile and desktop content

• Google is taking the migration process very slowly, and for now, is not migrating sites over that are not "ready".

• Google has not announced any firm timeline for when they plan to migrate the remainder of all websites.

In answering this question, I typically mention all of the above to help allay any fears. I then state that it could maybe be anywhere from one year to several years before the process is over - but with a huge disclaimer that this is pure speculation, and that only Google knows for sure. Lastly, I reiterate that Google in the meantime is strongly encouraging webmasters w mobile sites to ensure that they match the desktop version (URLs, schema, video, metadata, etc).  So the choice is to either to upgrade to responsive/adaptive, or upgrade the mobile site.  This is where the future is going.

STILL - any additional feedback / thoughts / ideas / tips on this are welcome, because I continue to struggle with answering this question for clients.   Thanks!

Agreed, one single URL is the ideal. This question is more geared towards webmasters who still have separate (smaller) mobile sites, and are more wondering how long they can get away with it.