When sharing pages to social medias or chat feeds, the appearance and the excerpt is very poor. This is mostly because of missing meta tags. This also result in poor SEO performances and ranking for Publish blogs.
Proposed solution
Having the ability to customize basic meta tags values. There’s, I think, at least 2 differents kinds of meta tags :
Globals meta tags :
Such as twitter handle and all the default value. These could be updated right in the Publish setting panel, with a simple text input for each
Local meta tags :
Tags scoped to a specific page such as title, description, image etc, could be just updated using the YAML Front Matter and reserved keywords. Like this :
meta_title: Lorem Ipsum
meta_description: Dolor sit amet
meta_image: [[image.png]]
These are shared between HTML basic meta, Facebook OG and Twitter. When no tags are set in the YAML Front Matter, these could just be set to the default value provided in the Publish settings.
Related feature requests (optional)
This feature can be related to the ability of providing our own Google Analytics tag on Publish website and every other feature request that would have been existing about SEO. (Favicon, custom logo…)
I confess: I am surprised (and disappointed) there has not been more interest in this feature request.
The lack of social sharing options in Obsidian is, for me, the single biggest obstacle to using Obsidian for any and all of the public projects I’ve been considering. . . .
@anthonyamar ~ Have you, or any of the other people following this discussion, come up with any functional workarounds?
Unfortunately not that much.
I still need to make some test using Google Search Console to upload a sitemap in order to reference all the link in search engines, but it’s not say that it will work.
About social sharing, there’s no workaround possible, even with publish.js because meta tags need to be in the and adding them programaticaly using JS will unfortunately add it after search engines and previews parsed the tags.
So there’s no solution except waiting for further improvements. I think the devs are busy with launching the mobile app and that these kind of features will come a bit after the public release.
As i am searching for solutions why my published site doesnt get indexed at all after a couple months beeing online, i stumbled upon this request and want to show my support.
Your proposed solution seems to solve a lot of the issues i face (like inserting the google analytics tag etc…)
Many thanks, @anthonyamar ~ I appreciate your feedback about the limiting factors here, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed that meta tags will show up at some point after the public release of the mobile apps.
I wish there was better support for being able to be crawled. The main help doc site does not have proper formatting. Also, not everyone uses google analytics or an analytics module at all.
auto generate sitemap
auto generate robots
auto generate excertp / snippet for meta description (or somehow add a custom block field in Obsidian to setup)
open graph support
in publish plugin, add option like in WordPress to discourage bot crawl
A little effort will go a far way in my opinion, it might be a limiting factor on people signing up for publish (such as myself).
I’d love to see these enhancements in Obsidian Publish.
I think there should definitely be YAML support for changing the title, page description, etc. which would greatly help with SEO.
I realize many people use Obsidian Publish to share notes, but mine has replaced my blog. I like the simplicity and the way it looks. The biggest negative right now is SEO.
This is really bad news for me, I thought there is certainly a way for meta tags, but I’m still trying to implement a basic JavaScript snippet for analytics (Not Google, Plausible).
Publish now seems like a wrong choice for blog materials, without SEO and indexing.
I can’t even share the link, which seems so bad without the title and description. (Obsidian Publish. Powered by Obsidian Publish.) I pay for a service, but it has watermarks everywhere, in the website, in the graph, in the meta tags, everywhere. Feels like a free service honestly.
We are using publish for work and sharing the link becomes difficult when the home page doesn’t show meta data in the link previews. I definitely think it says Obsidian Publish too often which confuses the context of the actual content.
It says Obsidian Publish twice, while once will serve the visibility purpose. I would prefer “Powered by obsidian publish” because Obsidian Publish in the title is misleading as to the page contents while powered by indicates the platform being used.
In my opinion this fix might increase adoption of publish especially by companies like mine, since branding becomes important in these use-cases.
I would like to throw my vote/hat into the ring. Open Graph meta tags would be awesome. It would be really nice to treat this like a publishing platform and have engaging social links. Healthy defaults using headers, images, and such, but allowing for override and tags as listed above would be a great start.
As a couple of tall order asks as well. Make the pages be pre-rendered (much better for SEO), JAMStack style, and allow for a plugin concept where there could be hooks into the render lifecycle of the page. That way we could have our community plugins that we love work in the cloud as well
Not sure how gnarly these features would be to implement, but just wanting to bump this topic. Obsidian Publish would be a total game changer for me personally if it had more SEO capabilities as well as some of the meta tag capabilities mentioned in this thread.
Super grateful to have Obsidian at all though; thanks devs!
The custom Google Analytics tags and logo is already there. There’s a card on their roadmap that said “More SEO improvements” in long term. So let’s see, but thanks for upvoting this!
Hi! As the creator of obsidian product management knowledge website, I always think about new users (knowledge holders) attraction. It is easy and free and possible via growing in Google Search my obsidian website ranking.
For example, here is what meta description tag looks like. Right now it just a duplicate of meta title tag and that’s not good for SEO.
<meta name='keywords' content='page tags'>
<meta name='description' content='page description 150 words'>
<meta name='og:description' content='A group of U.S. Marines, under command of...'>
SEO is an important thing for any knowledge website growth and I see how Google bot loves cross-linking sites like Wikipedia and Obsidian.
The reason for this love is simple – users move deep and deep into the content (Google Analytics evaluates content and site as quality and relevant for search keywords), and this is a basic ranking factor for Google. So, Obsidian Publish users can grow that opportunity and attract new members via Google Search.
Moved to Feature Requests. Also removed the "editor-legacy " tag and added the “publish” tag.
In future if you need to move a post and can’t (I think you get the ability after a while), you can flag it (flag icon, hidden in the “…” icon at the bottom of the post) and choose “Something else”. That makes the request visible to all moderators. Pinging invdividual team members violates the community code of conduct (last item in https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/Community+code+of+conduct#Other+offenses).
Agree — SEO improvements IMO is a core requirement that makes Obsidian Publish a more public-friendly medium, which I believe is the original intention in the first place.
