SEO
How search visibility works across TDC Site Builder — metadata, sitemaps, robots rules, and best practices.
TDC Site Builder 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, and robots.txt disallow rules. |
| Per-page | Page Manager → SEO button | Each page's meta title and description, indexing, sitemap inclusion/priority/frequency, and canonical overrides. |
Site-wide settings set the baseline; per-page settings refine individual URLs. If the site-wide Allow search engines toggle is off, the whole site is hidden regardless of per-page settings.
How Metadata Reaches Search Engines
SEO metadata is written into each page's <head> on publish. Editing an SEO field saves it, but it doesn't go live until you open the editor and Publish that page. Always publish after changing SEO.
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 ~80 characters and include your brand.
- 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.
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.