Redirects and SEO

Most of this looks after itself. This page is mostly about knowing that, and about the two screens where you can step in.

On each entry

Every entry has SEO fields: the title search engines show, the description underneath it, and the image used when someone shares the link.

Leave them empty and they fall back to what the page already has — its title, its excerpt, its featured image. A page is never unlabelled. Filling them in is an override for when the page’s own title is not the title you want in a search result.

Write descriptions for people rather than for search engines: a sentence that tells someone whether this is the page they wanted.

Sitemaps and robots.txt

sitemap.xml is generated from your published content and stays current as you publish — you never edit it, and there is nothing to submit again after each change.

robots.txt is generated too. On staging, both tell crawlers to stay away, so an unfinished site does not turn up in search results.

Redirects

Redirects lists every redirect on the site.

Most of them appear without you doing anything: changing a published entry’s slug records one from the old address automatically. You can also add your own, which is what you want when moving to Nibble from another site and bringing years of links with you.

Chains are collapsed as they are made, so a URL that has been redirected twice still arrives in a single hop. That matters for speed and for search engines, and it means you can keep renaming things without accumulating a trail.

The 404 monitor

404s lists the addresses people asked for and did not find, most-requested first.

This is the most useful SEO screen in the panel and the least glamorous. A path at the top of that list is a real person, repeatedly, failing to reach something — usually an old URL from a previous site. Add a redirect and the problem is solved for everyone who follows.