On this page
SEO
Clay prepares every page for search engines and link previews on its own. Each page is pre-rendered to complete HTML, so crawlers see the full content without running JavaScript.
#What every page gets
| Tag | Content |
|---|---|
<title> |
Page title and site title: “Search · Clay” |
<meta name="description"> |
The page’s description, see below |
og:title, og:description, og:type, og:site_name |
The same for link previews in chats and social networks |
<html lang> |
The language of the page |
article:modified_time |
The date of the last change, from git |
With siteURL set, pages also get:
| Tag | Content |
|---|---|
<link rel="canonical"> |
The page’s full address, so search engines know which URL to show |
og:url |
The same, for link previews |
| Breadcrumbs (JSON-LD) | Where the page sits, shown in search results as “Clay › Features › SEO” |
hreflang links |
The page’s translations |
#Descriptions
The description is the short text search engines show under a result. Clay takes the first of:
descriptionin the page’s front matter,- the first paragraph of the page,
- the description of the start page,
docs/index.md.
It is cut to 160 characters at a word boundary. A good description says in one or two sentences what the page answers:
---
description: Deploy a Clay site to GitHub Pages with a workflow that builds on every push.
---#Sitemap and robots.txt
With siteURL, Clay writes sitemap.xml with every page and the date of its last change, and robots.txt pointing to it.
siteURL: "https://my-org.github.io"
baseURL: "/my-project/"The sitemap is then at https://my-org.github.io/my-project/sitemap.xml. Submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Note
Search engines only read robots.txt at the root of a domain. When your site lives under a path, its robots.txt is informational; submit the sitemap in the tools above instead.
#Versions and translations
- Pages of older versions are regular pages with their own URLs and sitemap entries.
- A page that is not translated yet shows the original text in the other language. Its canonical link points to the original, and it is left out of the sitemap, so search engines do not see duplicate content.