First, the thing we got wrong
Between April and the end of July, myMat sites were not being read properly by search engines.
Your site looked completely normal in a browser — that's exactly why it took us so long to catch. But when Google's crawler came to visit, it was handed a blank page. No title, no text, nothing to index. For any studio relying on search to be found, that's the difference between existing and not.
That's fixed as of 30 July. Sites now serve fully-formed pages to crawlers, and we've added monitoring so that if the part responsible ever stops working again, the site restarts itself rather than quietly serving empty pages.
We're sorry. If you've been wondering why search traffic went quiet this spring, this was why — and it wasn't anything you did.
Search engines take days to weeks to re-crawl and re-rank a site, so give it a little time. Everything below is designed to make that re-crawl count for as much as possible.
Your site now introduces itself properly
When someone shares your site — in a text, on Instagram, in a Facebook post — the preview card that appears was, frankly, embarrassing. Blank descriptions. Titles that ended in a stray "|". No preview image, even when your hero photo was sitting right there.
Now your site writes its own introduction from what you've already told us:
- The title uses your name, falling back to your own name if you haven't set one.
- The description uses your site description, or your bio, or your tagline — whichever you've filled in. It's never blank.
- The preview image uses your hero photo, so shared links actually look like your studio.
There's nothing new to fill in. We only ever use words you wrote — we won't invent a yoga style or a location for you, because that would mean putting a claim about your business in front of the public that you never made.
If you do want more control, editing your site title, tagline or description in the editor changes what search engines and social previews show. Those fields now pull double duty.
Workshops and retreats can appear as real event listings
You know how some events show up in Google with a date, a price and a "Register" line right there in the results? That requires giving Google a structured description of the event, and we now do that automatically for your published workshops, retreats, trainings and classes.
One thing worth knowing: we're strict about dates on purpose. If your event date is written in a way that could be read two ways — 09/10/2025 means September 10th in the US and October 9th nearly everywhere else — we leave the event out of the structured listing rather than guess. Publishing your retreat on a day it doesn't happen is worse than not publishing it at all.
So it's worth a quick check. If you write your event dates unambiguously — 15 Jan 2026 rather than 09/10/2025, and always with a year — your events become eligible for those richer search results. Same for prices: $3500 works, from £15 and donation based don't give us an amount and a currency to work with, so we leave the price off rather than get it wrong.
Weekly classes get their recurring schedule described properly — the days and times you set, marked as weekly — instead of a made-up one-off date.
Half-finished sites now stay out of search until they're ready
Your site goes live the moment you pick a name and a web address, which is step one of setting up. Everything after that — your theme, your classes, your bio — is optional and might happen days later.
Until now, that meant a brand-new, empty site could be picked up by Google and indexed as an empty site. First impressions are hard to undo.
Now, a site is only offered to search engines once there's something real on it: a bio, or at least one published class, event or offering. Before that, it stays reachable to anyone you send the link to, but it stays out of search results.
A few deliberate decisions in there worth naming:
- Contact details aren't required. Plenty of teachers work online only, or would rather not publish a phone number. Requiring contact info would have hidden exactly the studios who made a sensible privacy decision.
- We don't require you to "finish" setup. There's no checklist you have to complete. Add real content and you're in.
We also now publish a proper sitemap for every studio site, so search engines know which of your pages exist rather than having to stumble across them.
A late payment no longer costs you your search ranking
This one is quiet but matters a lot.
When a subscription lapsed, we took the site offline in a way that told search engines the site was permanently gone. Google would remove it. When the subscription was reactivated and the site came back, it came back to nothing — starting from zero, with weeks of re-indexing ahead. A studio a week late paying could lose months of hard-won search position.
Now an offline site tells search engines "temporarily unavailable, check back" instead. Your ranking is held while you're away and is there when you return.
To be clear about privacy: this response is identical for every offline site, whether you unpublished it yourself for a rebrand or a payment didn't go through. A visitor can't tell the difference, and neither can anyone poking at your site from the outside. Your billing situation is nobody else's business.
Event pages that were broken now work
If you'd filled in your teacher profile, your event detail pages were erroring out — for visitors and for you. That's fixed.
Two related things came with it:
- Your bio photo now actually appears on event pages. It never had, due to a mix-up on our side that failed silently instead of loudly.
- Your bio formatting is preserved. Paragraphs and links now render properly on event pages instead of showing raw formatting.
Accessibility and readability
Public pages are being read by more than just people browsing — screen readers and search crawlers both rely on the underlying structure of a page. Two fixes here:
- Page headings now follow a proper order. Class and event card titles were sitting at the wrong level, which makes a page harder to navigate with a screen reader and muddier for search engines to interpret. Fixing it without changing how anything looks took more care than you'd expect.
- Your teacher photo is now described by name. Every myMat site was using the same generic description for that image. Identical descriptions across thousands of sites describe nothing — and this is the one image most worth describing properly.
Behind the scenes
Less glamorous, but it's what stops the above from silently breaking again:
- Automated checks now catch a whole class of bug before it can reach your site. The tool meant to be doing this had been running and finding nothing at all — turning it on properly surfaced two real defects that were already live, including one affecting our in-app support chat.
- Background jobs — trial reminders, billing reconciliation — are running for the first time in months.
- Routine security and dependency updates.
What you should do
Nothing, mostly. All of this applies to your existing site automatically.
Two optional things worth ten minutes:
- Check your event dates and prices are written unambiguously (
15 Jan 2026,$45) so your events qualify for richer search listings. - Check your site description and bio are filled in — they're now doing real work in search results and shared links.
Search engines re-crawl on their own schedule, so give it a couple of weeks before judging the results. If your site still isn't appearing after that, reach out through the support chat in the editor and we'll take a look at your specific setup.