SEO Settings help you manage how your community, events, and content appear in search engines and when links are shared externally.

For events and content pieces, you can add keywords and customize the page title, description, and social sharing image. At the community level, dashboard admins can also customize the community’s robots.txt file to control which public pages search engines are allowed to crawl.

Event and content SEO settings can be found in the event dashboard or content overview page. Community-level SEO settings can be found under Dashboard > Settings > Community > SEO Settings.

From the admin dashboard, navigate to Settings > Community > SEO Settings.

From here, you can view and manage community-level SEO settings, including your community’s robots.txt rules.

Go to your event dashboard (Dashboard > Events > ), click on Event Setup and then SEO Settings.

Go to the overview page for your video, blog, or resource (Dashboard > Content > Videos/Blogs/Resources > <your video/blog/resource>), click on SEO Settings on the top-right corner next to Action.

For events and content pieces, there are four SEO settings you can configure: Page Title, Keywords, Description, and Social Sharing Image.

Community-level SEO Settings also include robots.txt controls, which allow dashboard admins to manage which public areas of the community search engines can crawl.

Every time you update the title and description of your event or content piece, they will automatically be copied and populate the Page Title and Description fields. You can choose to customize them, in which case the auto-update will stop.

For example, the text you entered in Description on the General Info page for your event, as shown below:

will be loaded as the SEO description, as follows:

You can change the SEO description to be a concise and clear one to two-liner.

This graphic will default to the cover image configured in the Event Setup page or the content overview page but can be changed.

Keywords do not automatically load, so we suggest adding a few keywords to drive traffic to the event or content piece.

Your community’s robots.txt file tells search engines which areas of your community they can and cannot crawl.

Gradual automatically includes default rules that protect private and system pages from being crawled. Dashboard admins can add custom Allow and Disallow rules in addition to these default rules. Custom rules do not replace Gradual’s default rules.

To manage your robots.txt rules, navigate to Dashboard > Settings > Community > SEO Settings. Find robots.txt, then select Edit.

If no custom rules have been added, the setting will display Default rules only. If custom rules have been added, you’ll see the number of custom rules currently configured.

Select Edit next to robots.txt to open the configuration window. You’ll see two sections:

Custom rules support two directives:

For example, if you don’t want search engines to crawl public club pages, you can add a Disallow rule for the applicable club path.

Custom rules can contain up to 10,000 characters. When you’re finished, select Save to apply your changes.

Gradual checks your custom rules when you save them. Each line must use Allow or Disallow followed by a valid path. Rules that are incorrectly formatted or use unsupported directives cannot be saved, and you’ll see an error so you can correct the affected rule.

An Allow rule also cannot make a page available for crawling if that page is protected by one of Gradual’s default rules. For example, if /login is protected by a default rule, adding Allow: /login will return an error and the change will not be saved.

If you add Disallow: /, Gradual will ask you to confirm the change before saving. This rule prevents search engines from crawling your entire community, so use it only when you intentionally want to block all community pages from crawling.

To remove your custom robots.txt rules, select Revert to default in the configuration window. This clears the custom rules you’ve entered while keeping Gradual’s default rules in place.

Select Save to confirm the change. Your community will then use the default robots.txt rules only.

Select Preview next to robots.txt to see the complete robots.txt file that search engines receive for your community.

The preview combines Gradual’s default rules with any custom rules you’ve added and includes your community’s sitemap information. Use the preview to review the complete file after making changes to your custom rules.

Note: robots.txt controls which pages search engines can crawl. Blocking a page in robots.txt does not remove that page from search results if it has already been indexed by a search engine.