SEO settings
You can set the necessary SEO settings for indexing your website by search engines (Yandex, Google, etc.). This will help its promotion on the Internet.
In the SEO section, you can:
- Enable search engine indexing for the project domain
- Add robots.txt
- Generate or add a sitemap
- Set redirect options (for URL with "www" and “/”)
- Set website verification
You can enable search engine indexing for the project domain. In this case, you will make your website available for search engines.
Here you can add robots.txt. This file is typically used to list the site URLs to be blocked from crawling by search engines. In this file, you can specify the site indexing parameters both for all robots at once, and for each search engine separately.
A sitemap is an xml file that serves as a project map for search engines.
A sitemap contains the URLs of the web pages and relevant data (e.g. last update, update frequency, page importance priority). All this information contributes to the fast and efficient indexing of your website pages by search engines.
A sitemap does not include pages that are blocked for indexing.
You can enable sitemap auto-generation for the project (default option). In this case, sitemap.xml will be generated automatically.
You can also add a sitemap manually.
You can set different options for users to open your website, that is:
- Set whether it is possible to open your project domain with or without ‘www’, or both variants are suitable.
- Open the project without ‘www’ (default) - the main domain (indexed by search engines) is the one without ‘www’. When you enter the address with ‘www’, you will be redirected to the main domain.
- Open the project with ‘www’ - the main domain is the one with ‘www’.
- Open the project with and without ‘www’ - the website will open regardless the ‘www’ prefix.
- Set the rules to process pages with and without the trailing slash at the end:
- ‘/page’ and ‘/page/’ - different pages - pages with and without the trailing slash at the end are two different pages.
- Redirect from ‘/page’ to ‘/page/’ - when entering an address without the trailing slash at the end, the system will redirect the user to a page with the slash.
- Redirect from ‘/page/’ to ‘/page’ - when entering an address without the trailing slash at the end, the system will redirect the user to a page without the slash.
You can choose which protocols to use with your website:
- https only
- http and https
This option is only available when connecting a custom domain.
Protocol option
With a custom domain for the project, a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate will be automatically issued for the site, and http to https redirect option will be enabled. This will not happen instantly, but rather after some time (usually within an hour). You will see a corresponding notification in the Data Transfer Protocol settings.
The Data Transfer Protocol settings will be available after receiving the SSL certificate.
When to change the data transfer protocol settings
If your site was previously indexed by search engines using the http protocol, they will treat http and https sites as different ones. To avoid this, you need to disable http to https redirect option.
Verification is a set of measures aimed to confirm the authenticity of your website. This option allows you to verify your website in various services, such as the Google Search Console, Yandex Webmaster, etc. Verification helps you confirm your ownership of the domain in the Google Search Console and Yandex Webmaster.
You can pass verification in two ways:
With a meta tag
Copy a meta tag from the service and paste it to the specified field.
With an HTML file
Upload an HTML file that you have obtained from the service.