SEO

How the page title is built
Description
Social previews: Open Graph and Twitter cards
Canonical URLs
Content indexing
Author
Which front matter affects SEO
Validating your metadata

Ananke sets sensible SEO and social-sharing defaults using Hugo’s embedded metadata templates (Open Graph, Twitter cards, and schema.org). This page explains what those defaults do and which front matter controls them.

How the page title is built #

The HTML <title> is built from the page title and the site title:

Page Title | Site Title

On the homepage, only the site title is shown. Set the page title in front matter and the site title in your configuration:

# config/_default/hugo.toml

title = "Example site"

+++
title = "About this site"
+++

Description #

The meta description uses the first value it finds, in this order:

the page’s description front matter;
the page’s summary (for content pages without a description);
the site-wide params.description.

Set a description per page for the best search-result snippets:

+++
title = "About this site"
description = "A concise description for search result snippets and social previews."
+++

Ananke includes Hugo’s embedded opengraph, twitter_cards, and schema templates, so pages expose Open Graph and Twitter/X card metadata automatically.

[!IMPORTANT] The social preview image comes from the images front matter array, not from featured_image. featured_image sets the on-page hero; to control the image used by Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and similar previews, set images:
+++
title = "About this site"
description = "A concise description for search result snippets and social previews."
images = ["/images/about-social.jpg"]
+++
If you want the same image as the hero and the social preview, set both featured_image and images (see Header and Hero).

You can also set a site-wide default images list in params so pages without their own image still get a social preview.

Canonical URLs #

By default each page’s canonical URL is its own permalink. To point a page at content published elsewhere, set canonicalUrl in front matter:

+++
title = "Reposted article"
canonicalUrl = "https://example.com/original-article/"
+++

Content indexing #

When the site is built for production, pages are marked index, follow so search engines index them. To keep a single page out of search results, add private: true to its front matter — the page is then marked noindex, nofollow:

+++
title = "Internal note"
private = true
+++

In non-production builds (for example hugo server or deploy previews) every page is marked noindex, nofollow automatically. See robots.txt and environments for the site-level equivalent.

Author #

The author meta tag uses the page’s author, falling back to the site-wide params.author. A list of authors is joined with commas. See General content features for examples.

Which front matter affects SEO #

Front matter	Effect
`title`	Page title and `<title>` tag
`description`	Meta description and social preview text
`images`	Open Graph / Twitter card image
`featured_image`	On-page hero image (not the social image)
`canonicalUrl`	Canonical link
`private`	Excludes the page from indexing
`author`	Author meta tag

Validating your metadata #

Build the site and inspect the generated <head>:

hugo --environment production

Open a built page in public/ and check the <title>, <meta name="description">, og:*, and twitter:* tags. For social previews, use each platform’s debugger (for example the Facebook Sharing Debugger or the LinkedIn Post Inspector) once the site is live.