Hello Partners,

We will be releasing several SEO improvements between January - April, targeting the following goals:

• solve the current SEO issues
• have SEO enabled out-of-the-box. For new sites, you should no longer be required to tweak SEO performance.

Below is a breakdown of the upcoming changes.

Trial sites will not be indexed by search engines

While a site is in Trial mode, we will automatically serve a robots.txt file which prevents search engine indexing. This will help you avoid having your site show up in search results while it's still in development, via the businesscatalyst.com or worldsecuresystems.com domains.

Once you've upgraded the site, we will stop serving the robots.txt file. You can then use your own robots.txt, if you choose to.

Have sites on BC domains redirect automatically to default domain after upgrade

To enable this, we are implementing a new engine for managing 301 Redirects. Here's a prototype of the UI (hold Shift key to highlight clickable areas). Among other improvements, the new engine supports any URL (including _blog, aspx, shtml) and a wildcard (e.g. if you just consolidated several about pages into a single one, you can redirect /about/* to /about.html).

While the existing redirects will be migrated to the new engine, there is no import/export functionality (reasoning: additional engineering resources were required for this, which we'd rather invest in more critical areas). However, we've invested in decreasing the need for import/export, by:

• being able to quickly search and edit all redirects online
• introducing wildcard support, so you can consolidate multiple related redirects in a single entry

In regards to BC domains, the issue we are solving is search engines seeing duplicate content on mysite.com, mysite.businesscatalyst.com and mysite.worldsecuresystems.com. Within 24 hours of adding a default domain to an upgraded site, we will automatically add the following 301 redirect rules:

This will work for white-labeled partners with white-labeled domains as well.

For example, a visitor reaching mysite.businesscatalyst.com/about.html will be 301 redirected to mysite.com/about.html.

The redirects aren't added immediately after adding the domain name, in order to give you time to update the DNS settings with your domain registrar, as instructed when adding a domain to BC. Also, /admin/ and a few other URLs will never be redirected, so that you can always access the Admin Console on the BC domain.

The following will not be addressed in the upcoming update:

• redirecting secure content on https://mysite.worldsecuresystems.com (just http://mysite.worldsecuresystems.com will be redirected)
• automatically solving the duplicate content issue for multiple domains. To solve this, you should add a rel=canonical link to templates. Finer control over the canonical link for products and web app items will be possible using liquid markup.

SEO options enabled out-of-the-box

All new sites will have automatically have the options available currently under Site Settings > SEO enabled, and this screen will be removed. The options are

• SEO friendly URLs for eCommerce, Announcements, Web Apps
• Enable partial URL matching for SEO friendly URLs
• Enable sitemap.xml for search engines

For existing sites, we will also activate all SEO options. Please let us know if you feel this will introduce any issues.

Note that sitemap.xml will always be enabled. However, as mentioned above, your site will not be indexed while on trial. Should you want to disable search engine indexing after upgrade, please use a custom robots.txt file or upload an empty sitemap.xml.

If you'd like to use a custom sitemap.xml file, simply upload it to your site. If this file exists, it will be served instead of the BC-generated sitemap.xml.

Site search module displays SEO friendly URLs

Search results for pages are now presented with .aspx URLs. These will be changed to SEO friendly URLs.

Handling page title and description metadata

The meta tags management functionality was removed from UI v3 as we're implementing better ways to manage the most common types: title and description. Search engines recommend these should be unique for every page.

Therefore, you will be able to manage page title and description metadata when editing a page:

• page title field presented in the UI will be the same as the <title> tag from HTML source. When one is changed, the other will also be updated to mirror this
• description metadata will be editable visually, similar to title
• page properties dialog will be removed

To set title and description for non-page entities, such as blog posts, products or web app items, you will be able to use the following in your layouts/module templates:

<head>
   <title>{tag_name}</title>
   <meta name="description" content="{tag_description}" />
</head> 

What about managing keywords metadata?

Search engines look for keywords in your site content (page title, URL, description metadata, and <body> content), and ignore the old keywords metadata tag. As setting keywords metadata won't help, we won't have a dedicated UI for it.

What about managing other metadata?

If you'd like to add other metadata tags to your pages or templates, including keywords, please add them using the HTML code editor.

Customizable URLs for blogs

We will investigate and attempt to implement a way to fully customize blog URLs, including "/_blog/" and using dashes instead of underscores in URLs.

What will not be implemented in 2012

Besides all the improvements above, there is far more which can be done regarding SEO. Long term, we are looking at adding more SEO features, such as:

• easy editing / batch update for all page titles and descriptions
• more granular control over sitemap.xml contents
• integrated SEO tools
• https support for redirects

Looking forward to your feedback, as we start developing these enhancements. For SEO best practices, see Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

A Happy, Search Engine Optimized New Year! :)
Marius