[Photo by Marina Leonova](https://www.pexels.com/photo/world-map-made-of-cork-board-on-white-wall-7634440/)

Optimizing Hugo Sitemaps to prioritize posts crawling over taxonomies

You might notice that I’ve been struggling recently with SEO and that I’ve been trying some tricks to improve it, but it feels not enough. I’ve been thinking about Google’s Crawl Budget1 and the way I could influence it to focus more on new and important content. Adding lastmod should help, but together with each new post added, Hugo generates a ton of taxonomy pages (tags, categories, etc) which also would have lastmod updated. Taxonomy pages might catch some traffic eventually, but nowadays they’re mostly useful for humans, when they’re looking for similar content. Search engines rather forward people directly to the content. ...

2024-05-17 · 3 min · timor
[Hugo](https://gohugo.io)

Automatically setting 'lastmod' in Hugo pages with Git modification date

Following my recent SEO issues , I’m actively exploring ways to bolster my website’s ranking. One aspect I’m keen to address is expediting Search Engine indexing for pages that have been altered or updated. This is precisely the purpose of Sitemaps, a feature fully supported by Hugo1. However, there’s a limitation in how Hugo handles this by default. It sets the lastmod parameter to either the page’s creation time or the last build time. What I aim to achieve is a clear separation between creation and modification dates. This would signal to Search Engines to focus on scrutinizing only the “changed” posts, expediting their reevaluation—an approach commonplace in the Wordpress realm but more intricate with Hugo. ...

2024-03-24 · 2 min · timor
[Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán](https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-shot-of-keys-on-a-red-surface-2882652/)

SEO kicks my stats

Towards the end of the year, I received a notification reminding me to renew the domain for my blog. The domain in question was timor.site. This was the first invoice I had received from GoDaddy since they acquired Uniregistry, and to my dismay, it was significantly more expensive than what I had been accustomed to paying. With the year drawing to a close, I was reluctant to invest too much time or money into the renewal process. Frustrated by the cost, I decided to redirect my blog to another domain I owned: gagor.pl (where this blog was actually running in the past). ...

2024-03-03 · 2 min · timor

WordPress - add meta tags: author, description, keywords, etc

After reading some SEO stuff I wanted to add some meta tags to my WordPress blog. I found this site: codex.wordpress.org/Meta_Tags_in_WordPress  external link . So WordPress thinks that it’s not necessary to have this meta tags any more… But I want it! 😃 Next funny thing is how they suggest to add meta tags: copy header.php - what about theme updates? ...

2014-03-27 · 1 min · timor