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Preparing your Matrix website for search

This section outlines the steps you should take to prepare your Squiz CMS website for search. The advice here applies to both integrating with DXP search and improving your site’s general SEO.

At a high level:

  • Ensure you have configured your robots.txt with appropriate rules for web robots, or are using appropriate robots meta tags within your content pages. If the search URL is part of the site’s domain then ensure this is disallowed in the robots.txt to prevent search engines from indexing your search results pages.

    This will improve your search results by preventing the indexing of non-content pages. This will also potentially have positive impacts on both the time it takes to update the search index for your website, and also any bandwidth costs you might incur for your website.

  • If your website has dynamically generated pages with varying URLs (like browse functions that might pass parameters to a script), or your website can be accessed using various URLs the use canonical URLs to set what the page URLs should be when indexing a particular page.

    This will improve your search results by removing duplication in the search results. It will also potentially have similar positive impacts on the time taken to index and your bandwidth usage.

  • If your website has content pages that are only designed to be accessed via a search function consider creating a sitemap.xml file that lists these unlinked pages and list the sitemap in your robots.txt.

Prepare your site