SEO & Metadata

Chinaski generates most SEO signals for you (canonical URLs, hreflang alternates, sitemaps, robots.txt, structured data, feeds) with per-page overrides where you need them. This section covers each signal, where its default comes from, and what controls you have.

In this section

• Canonical URLs: how every page gets a canonical URL automatically, and how to override one per page.
• Canonical Domain: the www-vs-bare redirect the builder emits from your Site URL, and how it stays in sync with canonical tags.
• Open Graph: the social sharing tags and their fallback chain.
• Meta Tags: titles, descriptions, the full head inventory, and the build-time SEO report.
• Sitemap: what’s in it, per-language outputs, and the per-page controls (include/exclude, priority, change frequency).
• Redirects: the redirect rules system: slug changes, status codes, patterns, and where the files live.
• 404 Management: the generated 404 page and the built-in monitor for missing paths.

The three sources of a page’s SEO values

1. Per-page fields (meta title/description, og:* fields, canonical URL, featured image): strongest priority.
2. Site settings (site name, tagline, URL base, twitter handle, default image), used when a page field is blank.
3. Automatic fallbacks computed by the builder (title from the content, description from the tagline, canonical from the site URL, structured data from breadcrumb-type context).

Most pages should be left alone and inherit: the same rules mean the preview matches the output.

The build-time quality gate

The builder scans every generated page for empty canonical URLs and empty/duplicate meta descriptions, counting each as SEO issues. Because baseline quality gates into the same pre-promotion check that guards build health, SEO regressions rate the same treatment as broken links rather than optional polish.

Where the rest of the signals live

• RSS feeds and hreflang alternates: generated per language as part of every build (the internationalization section covers the pairing rules).
• Structured data: JSON-LD shapes (WebSite, Organization, breadcrumbs) composed from settings and emitted into templates; the decoy/honeypot robots entries ride in the generated robots.txt, covered under deployment.
• Cloudflare/CDN-level visibility matters for international multilingual static sites: the standard output includes sitemap.xml and per-language alternates, with the reverse-proxy config documented for redirect rules that use the widest possible coverage.