social-media/docs/SEO.md

SEO And Public Page Prerendering

Socialize is primarily a client-side app, but the public marketing pages are prerendered during the frontend build so crawlers can index static HTML.

Public Indexed Routes

These routes are treated as public site pages:

• /
• /product
• /pricing
• /blogs
• /guides

Authenticated app routes under /app/* and auth utility routes such as /login, /register, /forgot-password, /reset-password, and /verify-email are excluded from indexing in robots.txt.

Build Flow

The frontend build runs:

vite build
vite build --ssr src/entry-public-ssr.js --outDir dist-ssr
node scripts/prerender-public.mjs
node scripts/write-public-seo.mjs

This is wired into:

cd frontend
npm run build

The prerender step writes static HTML files such as:

frontend/dist/index.html
frontend/dist/product/index.html
frontend/dist/pricing/index.html
frontend/dist/blogs/index.html
frontend/dist/guides/index.html

The SEO generator writes:

frontend/dist/robots.txt
frontend/dist/sitemap.xml

Production Domain

Set the public site URL when building for production:

cd frontend
VITE_PUBLIC_SITE_URL=https://your-domain.com npm run build

This value is used for:

• canonical URLs
• sitemap URLs
• the sitemap reference in robots.txt

If VITE_PUBLIC_SITE_URL is not set, the build falls back to SITE_URL, then http://localhost:5173.

Files To Update

When adding, removing, or renaming public indexed pages, update all of these:

• frontend/src/router/router.js
• frontend/src/entry-public-ssr.js
• frontend/scripts/prerender-public.mjs
• frontend/scripts/write-public-seo.mjs
• page metadata in the public page component via usePublicPageMeta

Public page metadata helper:

frontend/src/features/landing/publicPageMeta.js

Server Routing

Caddy is configured to serve prerendered directory indexes before falling back to the SPA:

try_files {path} {path}/index.html /index.html

Config file:

deploy/caddy/Caddyfile

This matters because /product should serve dist/product/index.html, not the SPA fallback dist/index.html.

Validation

After changes:

cd frontend
VITE_PUBLIC_SITE_URL=https://your-domain.com npm run build

Check generated HTML:

grep -n "<title>" dist/product/index.html
grep -n "canonical" dist/product/index.html
grep -n "Social media content approval" dist/product/index.html

Check crawler files:

cat dist/robots.txt
cat dist/sitemap.xml

Search Engine Setup

After deployment:

1. Confirm public routes return 200.
2. Confirm /robots.txt and /sitemap.xml are served.
3. Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console.
4. Keep auth and app routes out of the sitemap unless they become public content.