Tag Archives: search engines

How to Get Google to properly Index your Rails website

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In order to be properly indexed by Google (and other search engines), we need to fix three basic values in the header: title, description and keywords. So in header layout we should include them as meta tags:

%title= content_for?(:title) ? yield(:title) : "Lebrijo.com - Internet applications Consultancy"
 %meta{content: content_for?(:description) ? yield(:description) : "We build high quality Internet application for our customers", name: "description"}
 %meta{content: content_for?(:keywords) ? yield(:keywords) : "ruby, ruby on rails, consultancy, webapps, developers", name: "keywords"}

Another useful thing is creating a /sitemap.xml file where Engine-bots see your app structure. We can use the sitemap_generator gem, just including it in our Gemfile.

I have created a rake task for auto generating it:

desc "Generates sitemap"
  namespace :sitemap do
  task :generate do
  SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.default_host = 'http://www.lebrijo.com'
  SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.create do
    add '/', changefreq: 'daily', priority: 0.9
    add '/', changefreq: 'daily', host: 'http://blog.lebrijo.com', priority: 0.8
    add '/', changefreq: 'weekly', host: 'http://jenkins.lebrijo.com'
    add '/about', changefreq: 'weekly'
    add '/contact', changefreq: 'weekly'
  end
  SitemapGenerator::Sitemap.ping_search_engines
  end
end

And a Capistrano task, auto-generating sitemap on all deployments:

namespace :sitemap do
  desc "Generate sitemap.xml"
  task :generate do
    on roles(:app) do
      within release_path do
        with rails_env: fetch(:stage) do
          execute :rake, 'sitemap:generate'
        end
      end
    end
  end
after "deploy:published", :generate
end

Finally be careful with your ‘robots.txt’ file configuration, because Google should be allowed to download and crawl your page.

Once everything is done and deployed in your application, just add it to Google WebMaster Tools. Don’t forget to add your sitemap.xml.gz URL.

Here you have a great link enumerating what other things you can do to improve your website SEO features.