About the Site SEO Tags API

The Site SEO Tags API allows you to read and write the SEO tags that apply to a Wix site as a whole, rather than to one page. These are the tags a Wix user sets once and that appear across the site, such as the site's default social share image, whether search engines may index the site, and the verification tags that prove ownership of a site to a search engine.

With the Site SEO Tags API, you can:

• Retrieve the site's SEO tags, including any search engine verification tags.
• Set the site's default social share image.
• Control whether search engines may index the site.
• Set or clear the site's SEO tags.

Site indexability and robots.txt

Two things control how search engines treat a site, and they do different jobs:

• This API controls whether a site may be indexed, using a robots tag with a noindex directive. Use it as the primary control over whether a site appears in search results.
• The robots.txt API controls how crawlers crawl a site.

Note that a page blocked from crawling in robots.txt can still be indexed, so blocking a crawler isn't a substitute for a noindex tag.

Concurrent changes

The site's tags are a single set with no revision checking, and a Wix user editing SEO settings in the dashboard writes to the same tags as this API. If both change the tags at once, whichever lands second overwrites the other, with no conflict error. When a Wix user may be editing at the same time, retrieve the tags immediately before writing them.

Before you begin

It's important to note the following points before starting to code:

• These tags are site-wide. To read or write the tags of an individual page or item, use the Item SEO Tags API.
• Setting tags replaces the site's tags in full. Retrieve the current tags first and send back the complete set you want the site to have. Leaving out the robots tag makes the site indexable again, and leaving out og:image clears the site's default social share image.
• Verification tags returned in embedTags are read-only. Those are the tags a Wix user added through the site's SEO settings in the dashboard, which stores them as HTML embeds. Verification tags in tags are writable, and a site supports a single tag per provider.
• Changes take effect on the live site without a site publish.
• Site SEO tags aren't language specific. One set of tags applies to every language version of a site.

Use cases

• Verify site ownership with a search engine
• Take a site out of search results, then put it back
• Move a site's SEO configuration from another platform

Terminology

• Site SEO tags: SEO tags that apply to the whole site rather than to one page.
• Verification tag: A tag a search engine requires on a site to confirm that the person configuring it controls the site. Also called a site ownership tag.
• Embed tags: Verification tags held as HTML embeds, in a separate store from the site's other tags. The live site renders them, but they're read-only here and are returned in embedTags.