SEO

Purpose

SEO configuration decides how search engines and social platforms understand a Solitude site. The most important fields are the canonical site URL, page title, description, preview image, robots rules, sitemap, and language alternates.

Canonical site URL

Set the final public URL before submitting the site to search engines.

# _config.yml
url: https://example.com

# _config.solitude.yml
site:
  name: My Blog
  description: Notes and essays from Your Name

Use the production domain, not a temporary preview URL. If the domain changes, update the URL and regenerate the site so canonical links, Open Graph links, and sitemap entries point to the same host.

Titles and descriptions

Every indexable page should have a unique title and a short description. Use the Hexo root config for site identity, then use Front Matter for page-level metadata.

---
title: Deploying Solitude
description: A checklist for publishing a Solitude blog with stable metadata.
---

Keep descriptions human-readable. They do not guarantee ranking, but they strongly affect how results and link previews are interpreted.

Social previews

Open Graph and Twitter cards usually reuse the page title, description, canonical URL, and preview image. Prefer stable image paths under the generated site, and verify that the final image URL can be opened without authentication.

Robots and sitemap

Allow crawling for public pages and expose a sitemap after the production URL is stable. Avoid blocking CSS, JavaScript, or image assets that are needed to render the page preview.

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Language alternates

For multilingual sites, make sure each translated page links to the matching alternate URL. Use the same canonical host for every language and avoid mixing preview domains with the production domain.

What to verify

• The site URL matches the final deployment domain.
• Each important page has a unique title and description.
• Preview images return a successful response.
• robots.txt points to the sitemap.
• The sitemap contains canonical URLs for public pages.
• Translated pages link to each other with language alternates.