SEO
How search visibility works across Blox — metadata, sitemaps, robots rules, and best practices.
Blox gives you full control over how search engines discover, crawl, and display your site. SEO settings live in two places — per page and site-wide — and this page explains how they fit together, plus the practices that get the best results.
Per-Page SEO
Meta title, description, indexing, sitemap priority, and canonicals for each page.
Site-Wide SEO
Global crawl permission, sitemap.xml, canonical base domain, and robots rules.
The Two Levels of SEO
| Level | Where | Controls |
|---|---|---|
| Site-wide | Site → General tab | Whether search engines may crawl the site at all, sitemap generation, the canonical base domain, robots.txt disallow rules, and site-wide AEO/GEO settings. |
| Per-page | Page Manager → SEO button | Each page's meta title, description, and keywords; indexing and follow directives; sitemap inclusion/priority/frequency; canonical overrides; and per-page AEO/GEO fields. |
Site-wide settings set the baseline; per-page settings refine individual URLs. If the site-wide Allow search engines toggle is off, robots.txt disallows the entire site regardless of per-page settings — new crawling stops immediately, though pages already indexed by Google don't disappear from results right away.
How Metadata Reaches Search Engines
SEO fields save straight to the live page — there's no draft/publish split for them the way there is for page content. Once you click Save, the new title, description, robots directives, canonical URL, and sitemap entry are live on the public site within about a minute (the page's cache window). You don't need to open the editor and publish just to change SEO.
Publishing is still required for everything else — layout, sections, and copy changes only go live when you Publish the page. SEO fields are the one exception.
Crawling vs. Indexing
These are two distinct controls, and you can combine them:
| Tool | Where | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Disallow (robots.txt) | General tab | Tells bots not to visit the URL at all. |
| noindex meta tag | Per-page SEO | Allows crawling but tells bots not to index the page. |
- Use noindex when you want a page crawled (e.g. to pass link equity) but kept out of results.
- Use Disallow to stop bots reaching a URL entirely.
- Use both for maximum exclusion.
Neither setting hides a page from visitors — both only affect search bots. To hide a page from everyone, use the Active Status toggle in page settings.
Sitemaps
When Enable sitemap.xml is on (General tab), the platform auto-generates https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml listing all active, indexable pages with the priority and change-frequency from each page's SEO settings. Submit that URL to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to speed up discovery.
Best Practices
| Page type | Recommended settings |
|---|---|
| Homepage | Sitemap priority 1.0, frequency daily, indexed + in sitemap. |
| Blog posts | Priority 0.7, frequency weekly, a unique meta description per post. |
| Thank-you / confirmation | noindex, excluded from sitemap. |
| Duplicate or variant pages | Set the canonical URL to the primary version. |
- Keep meta titles under 60 characters and include your brand — the field's counter turns red past that.
- Aim for meta descriptions of 120–160 characters — they influence click-through.
- Set a Canonical Base Domain on the General tab once you connect a custom domain, so canonicals and sitemap entries use it instead of the subdomain.
- For pages you want AI tools like ChatGPT Search or Perplexity to cite directly (pricing, FAQs, product pages), fill in the AEO Q&A and AI Key Takeaways fields — they supplement, not replace, the meta title and description.
Turning off crawling for an already-indexed site does not remove it from Google immediately — de-indexing happens gradually as bots re-crawl. For urgent removal, use Google Search Console's removal tool.
Related
Saving & Publishing
Understand the difference between drafts and published versions, how to manage version history, and real-time collaboration.
Site Overview & Page Manager
A complete guide to the site management page — navigating tabs, managing pages, configuring SEO, and collaborating with your team.