Improve search-engine crawlability of docs (#719)

Claudio-Chies · web-flow · commit 487d2528cb2e · 2026-06-17T11:10:13.000+10:00
diff --git a/.vitepress/config.mjs b/.vitepress/config.mjs
@@ -12,6 +12,10 @@ export default defineConfig({
   description: "MAVLink Developer Guide",
   //base: process.env.BRANCH_NAME ? "/" + process.env.BRANCH_NAME + "/" : "", //Build doesn't use branches!
   base: "",
+  lastUpdated: true,
+  sitemap: {
+    hostname: "https://mavlink.io",
+  },
   srcExclude: [
     "de/**/*.md",
     "ja/**/*.md",
@@ -115,8 +119,36 @@ export default defineConfig({
     },
   },
   //Logs every page loaded on build. Good way to catch errors not caught by other things.
+  //Also injects per-page SEO metadata (description, OpenGraph, canonical) into the
+  //server-rendered <head> so message pages are better crawled/snippeted by search engines.
   async transformPageData(pageData, { siteConfig }) {
     console.log(pageData.filePath);
+
+    const desc =
+      pageData.frontmatter.description ||
+      pageData.description ||
+      (pageData.title
+        ? `${pageData.title} — MAVLink message, enum and command reference.`
+        : "MAVLink Developer Guide");
+
+    // Set pageData.description so VitePress's own <meta name="description"> uses it
+    // (pushing a second description tag in head would be deduped in favour of the default).
+    pageData.description = desc;
+
+    const url =
+      "https://mavlink.io/" +
+      pageData.relativePath
+        .replace(/(^|\/)index\.md$/, "$1")
+        .replace(/\.md$/, ".html");
+
+    pageData.frontmatter.head ??= [];
+    pageData.frontmatter.head.push(
+      ["meta", { property: "og:title", content: pageData.title }],
+      ["meta", { property: "og:description", content: desc }],
+      ["meta", { property: "og:type", content: "article" }],
+      ["meta", { property: "og:url", content: url }],
+      ["link", { rel: "canonical", href: url }]
+    );
   },
 
   //
diff --git a/package.json b/package.json
@@ -9,7 +9,6 @@
     "docs:buildwin": "set NODE_OPTIONS=--max_old_space_size=8192 && vitepress build .",
     "docs:build_ubuntu": "NODE_OPTIONS='--max-old-space-size=8192' vitepress build .",
     "docs:preview": "vitepress preview .",
-    "docs:sitemap": "python3 ./scripts/gen_sitemap.py",
     "docs:gen_alt_sidebar_ubuntu": "python3 ./scripts/gen_alt_sidebar.py",
     "docs:get_alt_sidebar_windows": "python ./scripts/gen_alt_sidebar.py",
     "start": "yarn docs:dev",
diff --git a/public/robots.txt b/public/robots.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+User-agent: *
+
+Sitemap: https://mavlink.io/sitemap.xml

Original file line number	Diff line number	Diff line change
`@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@`
	`1`	`+User-agent: *`
	`2`	`+`
	`3`	`+Sitemap: https://mavlink.io/sitemap.xml`