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SEO for Experience Builder Sites FAQ
Answers to common questions about using SEO in your Experience Builder site.
Required Editions
| Available in: Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions |
| Applies to: LWR and Aura sites |
- Can I use SEO features on a sandbox org?
- No, SEO features are supported on production orgs only.
- Can I create a custom sitemap?
- Don’t create custom sitemaps for Aura or LWR sites, as they’re difficult to maintain and scale. Instead, use the automatically generated sitemap.xml file.
- How often is the sitemap generated?
- If a site has been published, is active, and is public, the full sitemap is automatically generated one time a week, on Sunday. A partial sitemap refresh occurs every 24 hours and captures any changes made in the last day. You can manually regenerate a sitemap one time every 24 hours.
- Can I manually generate a sitemap for my site?
- If you go live with a new site or make significant changes to an existing site, you can manually generate a sitemap.
- Why does the sitemap have references to other sitemaps?
- The sitemap.xml file can contain only a limited number of URLs. For large sites, the sitemap is partitioned into multiple smaller sitemaps. These partitions organize the different public pages and objects in your site. Each partition is of the form sitemap-object-#.xml. The sitemap file also contains a partition called sitemap-object-weekly.xml. This partition contains new and updated pages from the current week, and is used for the daily partial sitemap refresh and the weekly sitemap generation. The sitemap-object-weekly.xml partition resets after that week’s sitemap generation.
- Does the sitemap include URLs for object pages?
- If an object’s detail page is public and you enable read access for the object, the URL for the detail page is included in the sitemap. You can make an object's list page public separately and include it in the sitemap by adding the page to the Navigation menu and then republishing your site. Related list pages are never included in the sitemap.
- Why don’t I see the automatically generated robots.txt file when I navigate to https://<site_URL>/robots.txt?
- Your site must be at the root level of your custom domain for the robots.txt file to appear. If you don’t have a custom domain set up and you’re using the *.force.com or *.my.site.com domain, then a site without the path prefix must exist.
- How do I change the indexing directives of the default robots.txt file?
- You can create a custom robots.txt file to implement a rules-based method to control the visibility of specific areas of your site to search engines. Pages whose URLs you add to the Disallow section of a custom robots.txt file can still appear in search results. To hide a public site page from search results use the noindex meta tag.
- How is SEO supported for sites with multiple languages?
- When multiple languages are added to a site, translation links are automatically added to each site page's head markup with <hreflang> link tags, according to Google's guidelines. The sitemap isn’t updated with additional translation links. You can't remove or disable the link tags, but you can configure unique SEO tags for each language.
- Can I remove the /s/ from the default site URL in Aura sites?
- No, the /s/ is required in the default URL for Aura sites. It’s not required for LWR sites.
- Does each article have its own URL?
- Yes, each article that appears in the Article Detail page has its own URL, which is
retrieved from the Knowledge article’s URL Name field.
Article URLs use the format /article/:urlName. However, the article's recordId is available for use with components on the Article Detail page, like the Article Content component. The recordId on the page is set to the most recent Knowledge Article Version ID for a published article, uniquely defined by the URL Name and, if present, the translation language.
Tip- If your org has custom components that rely on the article's
urlName, update the components to userecordIdinstead. - If your org supports multilingual Knowledge articles, keep the same URL as the base language article. We don’t recommend replacing the URLs of translated articles with language-specific URLs.
- If your org has custom components that rely on the article's
- Which bots are allowed to crawl Experience Builder sites, or get served their content snapshot?
-
- adsbot-google
- ask
- baidu
- bing
- chrome-lighthouse
- dotbot
- facebot
- googlebot
- gsa-crawler
- linkedinbot
- rogerbot
- screaming frog
- slackbot
- slurp
- swiftbot
- twitterbot
- Additionally, when you enable
generative engine optimization (GEO), these AI bots can receive static HTML
snapshots of your site:
- GPTBot
- OAI-SearchBot
- ChatGPT-User
- ChatGPT-User/2.0
- Anthropic-AI
- ClaudeBot
- Claude-User
- Claude-SearchBot
- Google-NotebookLM
- PerplexityBot
- CCBot
- MistralAI-User
- Can I update the title and add a description to articles to improve search engine results?
- Each Knowledge article has a URL Name, a
Title, and a Summary field. When the
article’s displayed in the Article Detail page in Experience Builder, these fields are
used for the page URL, the
title, anddescriptiontags on the page<head>. - Are pages with non-standard URLs, such as custom vanity URLs or URLs that include query string parameters, supported for SEO?
- No, pages with non-standard URLs aren’t included in the sitemap or content snapshots.
Therefore, search engines can’t crawl or index those pages.
For example, instead of using standard pages to deliver dynamic data via URL parameters (/s/product?productId=12345), use object pages for the record pages to be crawled (s/product/12345).
- How do I indicate that a version of a page is non-canonical?
- When different versions of a page exist, search engines crawl only the canonical
version of a page. To stop the search engine from arbitrarily choosing a URL as the
canonical version of multiple pages, indicate that a page is a duplicate of another page
(that is, non-canonical). To do so, add
a <link> element, with the attribute
rel=canonical and point to the canonical page. For example,
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/home" />. - How are non-canonical URLs for object pages handled?
- To improve your site’s SEO ranking, we redirect non-canonical URLs to canonical URLs
using 301 redirects. A canonical URL lets you tell search engines that slightly
different URLs, which all point to the same content, are actually the same thing. A 301
redirect indicates that a URL has been permanently moved, which is optimal for
SEO.
For example, let’s say you add object pages for the Account object. In this case, the detail page has an object-specific Account Detail page and a generic Record Detail page. When site members access the generic Record Detail page (/s/detail/recordId), they’re permanently redirected to the canonical URL of the object-specific Account Detail page instead (/s/account/recordId). Similarly, 301 redirects are used for list and related list pages.
- How are SEO-friendly URLs created for object detail pages?
- To create a user-readable URL for the detail page of a standard or custom object, we
append the value of the object’s Name field to the URL. For example, for AW Computing’s
Account Detail page, we redirect
https://mysite.com/s/account/001R0000002NzuaIAC to
https://mysite.com/s/account/001R0000002NzuaIAC/aw-computing.
Where the Name field isn’t available, we use the Subject or Title fields. Otherwise, we append “detail” to the URL.
- Can I use record names that contain special characters or spaces in my URLs?
- Yes, but the system automatically replaces all characters that aren't unicode letters or numbers. Spaces are replaced with a single dash and the final URL is truncated to a max length.
- How do I get analytics for material brought in using CMS Connect?
- Remember, the content you display in your site when using CMS Connect (JSON) doesn’t
live in your site. Getting usage data requires a few extra steps.
To configure External Objects for the data that you want to track, use Reports or OData, Salesforce Reporting.

