SEO is an important topic for public product/help docs. You want your users to be able to find your content via Google searches.

Overview

Out of the box GitBook projects are SEO-friendly, with little or no configuration on your end, thanks to the following features:

• ​ Custom domains (e.g: docs.example.com)

• ​ All public content is cached and served via our global CDN

• ​ All content is responsive and mobile-friendly

• ​ We automatically generate SEO-friendly content (urls, html, ...)

Technicalities

• ​ We automatically generate sitemaps based on your ToC

• ​ We generate SEO friendly URLs based on each page's title

• ​ The HTML we generate covers the essentials

  • We generate HTML titles and descriptions based on your GitBook page's title and description

  • We avoid duplicate content through smart canonical URLs

  • Image captions are rendered as alt attributes

• ​ HTML sent to crawlers is pre-rendered (i.e server-side) this means that crawlers do NOT need JavaScript to index your content (app.gitbook.com is an SPA and requires JS, but not user content)

Notes

We don't yet integrate with Google Search Console, you can upvote this existing feature-request if this is important.

We don't generate keyword meta tags, because contrary to popular belief, modern search engines do not use them to rank pages. This was officially confirmed by Google a few years ago: