SEO

NodePress stores the SEO data your site needs and generates a sitemap and a robots.txt. Your site renders the actual <title> and <meta> tags, because NodePress doesn’t render pages.

SEO fields on an entry

Every entry has an SEO & Open Graph section in the editor, apart from the content type’s own fields. It’s marked customized when any of it is filled in.

Field	Key	Use
SEO Title	title	The page title for search results, instead of the entry’s own title
Meta Description	description	The snippet search engines show (120–160 characters recommended)
OG Image URL	image	The image for social media shares (1200×630 recommended)
Exclude from search engines (noindex)	noIndex	Ask search engines not to index the page; also keeps it out of the sitemap

The API returns these in the entry’s seo object, or seo: null when none are set:

{
  "id": "8c0f8e6e-5b1a-4a39-9d62-0f3c2b6a1d44",
  "slug": "hello-world",
  "locale": "en",
  "data": { "title": "Hello world", "excerpt": "My first post." },
  "seo": {
    "title": "Hello world | Example Blog",
    "description": "How we built our first post with NodePress.",
    "image": "https://cdn.example.com/og/hello-world.jpg",
    "noIndex": false
  },
  "createdAt": "2026-10-26T09:00:00.000Z",
  "updatedAt": "2026-10-26T09:00:00.000Z"
}

Render them on your site, falling back to the entry’s own fields:

const title = entry.seo?.title ?? entry.data.title;
const description = entry.seo?.description ?? entry.data.excerpt;

<title>{title}</title>
<meta name="description" content={description} />
<meta property="og:title" content={title} />
{entry.seo?.image && <meta property="og:image" content={entry.seo.image} />}
{entry.seo?.noIndex && <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />}

Set them through the admin API with seo on POST /api/entries or PUT /api/entries/:id. Each translation of an entry has its own SEO fields.

Sitemap

GET /api/sitemap.xml returns an XML sitemap of your published content:

• the home page, <SITE_URL>/;
• one list page per content type, such as <SITE_URL>/blog-posts;
• one URL per published entry, such as <SITE_URL>/blog-posts/hello-world, with its last update date.

The content type part of the path is its URL form: hyphens instead of underscores, as in the API. Left out are:

• entries marked noindex;
• entries and list pages of content types that don’t offer the read or list endpoint (including private content types).

<url>
  <loc>https://www.example.com/blog-posts/hello-world</loc>
  <lastmod>2026-10-26</lastmod>
  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.6</priority>
</url>

The base address comes from the SITE_URL environment variable. SITE_URL is also the address NodePress uses for the admin in password reset and invitation links, so the sitemap is only correct as it is when your site and the admin share that address and your site uses /{type}/{slug} paths. The sitemap also lists every language version at the same URL. If your site’s URLs differ, build the sitemap on your site from the API instead (GET /api/:type lists published entries).

robots.txt

GET /api/robots.txt returns, with ROBOTS_DISALLOW=/admin,/api/private set:

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /api/private

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

The Disallow lines come from the ROBOTS_DISALLOW environment variable, a comma-separated list of paths. Without it there are none. The Sitemap line uses SITE_URL.

Search engines look for these files at the root of your site, but NodePress serves them under /api/. Proxy or rewrite /sitemap.xml and /robots.txt on your site to the API’s /api/sitemap.xml and /api/robots.txt, or serve your own.

Related

• When a published entry’s slug changes, NodePress adds a 301 redirect from the old address so links and rankings carry over. See Redirects.
• Alt text for images is stored in each image field. See Media.