Deekas

2 min read

Make three curated tag pages eligible for indexing

Summary

Diagnosed the live Hugo, Hetzner, and Personal Finance tag pages as HTTP 200 pages inheriting noindex, follow, missing descriptions, and excluded from the sitemap. Added content/tags/{hetzner,hugo,personal-finance}/_index.md with indexing and sitemap overrides, unique descriptions, editorial introductions, and relevant reading links. Tagged the hobby-project migration article with Hetzner. Extended the SEO suite, observed failures before the fix, and passed all 16 tests afterward; generated-page checks confirmed self-canonicals, sitemap inclusion, and resolving internal links. Production Hugo builds succeeded, including after tests/test_archive_seo.py was deleted at the user’s request; existing language API/config deprecation warnings remained. Pushed commits d33d11e and 20126a6 to origin/seo-improvements and opened PR #3 targeting main: https://github.com/dkarthick-works/deeka/pull/3. The working tree was clean. Deployment and actual Google indexing were not verified.

Decisions

  • Kept the default noindex/sitemap exclusion for other thin archives; opted in only the three curated tag pages.
  • Removed the tracked SEO test script at the user’s explicit request after its successful verification run; the indexing fixes remained unchanged.
  • Left the intentionally removed /sudden/cx and Cloudflare /cdn-cgi/l/email-protection URLs unchanged. Advised keeping genuine deletions as 404/410, redirecting only to a real replacement, and not blocking crawling merely to hide deletion reports.

Learnings

  • HTTP 200 and permissive robots.txt did not establish indexability: the taxonomy cascade still emitted noindex and disabled sitemap entries until overridden per curated page.
  • Removing indexing blockers only established eligibility; Google indexing remained discretionary, with Search Console indexing requests recommended after deployment.