SEO best practices: engineering conventions for production
Field-tested SEO practices from production, avoiding the common anti-patterns.
Quick answer
How do I keep canonical and sitemap hostnames consistent?
Both must read site.origin (the Astro site config). Hardcoded hostnames break the moment you change domain or run a Preview, and the page gets flagged as duplicate content.
Machine-readable page data: /data/seo-best-practices.json
In-depth analysis
SEO is fundamentally about making canonical signals (canonical link, sitemap, structured data) clear and traceable so search engines never classify your pages as duplicates. Production engineering conventions revolve around "single source of truth + explicit boundaries", steering clear of the common anti-patterns.
# public/robots.txt
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /links/
Disallow: /api/
Sitemap: https://aicode8.com/sitemap-index.xmlSEO Best Practices · Key takeaways
- Config centralized in a single source
- CI uses --frozen-lockfile
- Secrets are placeholders, never real values in code
- Docs and code live in separate places
FAQ & pitfalls
How often does search engine cache refresh?
Bump lastmod to trigger a sitemap re-crawl, paired with an independent canonical. Do not rely on forcing a CDN purge — after the static output updates, crawlers return naturally.
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Astro best practices: engineering conventions for production
Field-tested Astro practices from production, avoiding the common anti-patterns.
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What readers are asking
Questions that keep coming back in reader feedback, already answered.
- 01
How do the canonical and sitemap domains stay in sync?
Both must read site.origin (the Astro site setting). A hardcoded domain breaks everywhere the moment you change domains or use a Preview URL, and the pages get treated as duplicates.
See the full guide → - 02
How do I stop generated pages being flagged as duplicate content?
Every page needs a unique canonical, its own title, and genuinely differentiated body copy. Pages that only swap a keyword while keeping an identical structure must gain real differences, or search engines fold them together.
See the full guide → - 03
Why is my Astro component's interactivity not working?
Components ship as zero-JS HTML by default, so an interactive one needs a client:* directive (client:load, client:visible, …). Without it the script is never bundled into the page.
See the full guide →