SEO

See which of your pages Google will struggle with, fix them in place, and set the wording your whole site falls back on.

Where to find it: Site → SEO (/admin/seo). The link only appears under Site if your admin account can see Pages. The Redirects and Site defaults tabs aren't listed in the sidebar; open SEO and switch tab, or type "redirects" into the admin search.

Three tabs:

• Page health — every page a search engine can reach, with what is wrong with each one.
• Redirects — where old addresses send people, so links that used to work still do.
• Site defaults — your homepage wording, the character between a page title and your site name, whether finished competitions stay in Google, and whether renaming something keeps its old links alive.

Check your page health

The three cards across the top are the summary:

• Health score — the share of your pages with nothing wrong at all. It turns green above 90%, amber above 60%, red below. Pages you have hidden from Google don't count either way.
• Pages Google can see — your live competitions, your own pages, and the built-in ones like Winners and Terms. Hidden pages are left out, and the card says how many there are.
• Need attention — how many have at least one problem.

Under them, a row of filter chips narrows the table:

Chip	Shows
All issues	Every page with something wrong
Missing description	Pages with no description, or one that's too short to be useful
Title length	Titles Google will cut off, or ones so short they waste the space
Duplicates	Pages sharing a title with another page
Healthy	Pages with nothing wrong
Hidden from Google	Pages that ask not to be listed. They are not checked, so they never show a problem

Each row shows the page's title and address, what kind of page it is, and coloured chips for what needs doing. Hover a chip to see what it means.

• Red means the page has no description at all. Google will scrape some text off the page and use that, and it is rarely the sentence you would have chosen.
• Amber is a judgement call — a title that runs long, or a duplicate.
• Grey "Hidden from Google" is a page you have kept out of search. It is not checked, because nobody finds it on Google anyway.
• Green "Healthy" means there is nothing to do.

If your site has grown very large, an amber note appears above the table saying the score covers only the most recent pages. Everything listed is still accurate.

Sidebar alert indicator

When overall site SEO health requires operator attention, an advisory badge appears on the Site row in the admin sidebar, and beside SEO when you open the Site submenu:

• Amber alert (!) appears when your health score drops below 90%, indicating warnings or missing descriptions need attention.
• Red critical alert (!) appears when your health score drops below 60%, indicating widespread issues.
• The alert badge automatically clears once you resolve issues and health recovers to 90% or above.

Opening Site → SEO recalculates the latest page health and updates the badge on the next navigation cycle.

Let Compy fix a whole list

Compy can write titles and descriptions for every page in a list in one go. You check what he wrote before anything changes on your site.

1. On Page health, click a chip — Missing description, Title length, or All issues.
2. Click Compy, fix these above the table. Under the button it says how many pages Compy can write for.
3. A panel opens and fills up as Compy writes. Each page shows what Compy wrote, with the same length counters as the editor, and what the page says now.
4. Change any wording you would put differently. Untick Use this on any you don't want.
5. Click Save. Only the ticked pages change.

The arrow next to the button lets you pick Just descriptions or Just titles. Otherwise Compy writes whatever each page needs: a description where it's missing or too short, a title where it's too long or too short.

Compy writes from the page itself: the competition's title, summary, description, main prize, ticket price, instant wins and end date, or a page's own wording. He doesn't make up prize details, but read his work before you save it.

Some pages are left out:

• Duplicates — Compy won't pick which of two same-named pages to change. Give one a title that tells them apart, for example by adding the month.
• Built-in pages — their wording is part of the platform.
• Hidden pages, and pages you are not allowed to edit.

If you close the panel before saving, Compy's drafts are thrown away; you are asked first. On a big list Compy may stop for the hour and say so. Click Carry on later to finish the rest.

Fix a page

1. Click any row on Page health.
2. A panel slides in from the right, opening with a white card showing exactly how the page will look in a Google result.
3. Edit the Meta title and Meta description. The preview updates as you type.
4. Click Save.

The row updates the next time the page loads, so a page you have just fixed drops off the issues list.

Both fields are optional. Leave one blank and the greyed-out placeholder text is what your visitors get — for a competition, its title and summary. Fill one in and it replaces that.

Your meta title replaces the whole title, site name included. If you type "Win a Golf R" it will say exactly that in Google, not "Win a Golf R ‹ Your Site". That is why the counter aims at 30–60 characters — that is the whole thing.

This changed with this release. If you set a Meta Title on any of your content pages before today, your site name used to be added after it and now is not. So a page whose meta title reads "FAQ" now shows just "FAQ" in Google. Open Page health, look for short titles, and add your site name yourself where you want it.

Under each box is a coloured bar and a character count:

• Green — a good length. Aim for 30–60 characters for a title, 70–160 for a description.
• Amber — saveable, but Google will probably cut it off, or there is room to say more.
• Red — past the limit; shorten it before saving.

Let Compy write it

Click Compy, write these above the boxes. He reads the page's own wording and writes a search title of up to 60 characters and a description of about 160. The arrow next to the button lets you choose Just the description or Just the title. Read what he wrote before you save. It is a first draft, not a final answer.

The same button is in the Search engines section of a competition and on Site defaults. On Site defaults it only writes your homepage description, because your homepage title is your site name and tagline.

If your site has no AI key set up you will get a message saying so instead.

Hide a page from Google

The Hide from search engines switch at the bottom of the panel keeps that one page out of search results. Anyone with the link can still open it and still enter. Use it for a page you have made for a specific audience — an email-only competition, say — rather than as a way of taking a page down.

Built-in pages

Rows marked Built in — Winners, Terms, Privacy and so on — cannot be edited here. Their wording is part of the platform. Clicking one takes you to Site defaults, which is the only thing about them you can change.

Keep old links working

Every address on your site is a link somebody might have. An email you sent last week. A post someone shared. A Google result. A WhatsApp message. Change the address and every one of those goes to "page not found" — and Google eventually stops sending people to it at all.

The Redirects tab is the list of old addresses and where each one now sends people.

You mostly don't have to do anything

Renaming a page or a competition sets its redirect up for you. Change a competition's address from /competitions/win-a-golf to /competitions/win-a-golf-r and the old address starts working again straight away — anyone using it lands on the competition, and Google is told the page has moved rather than gone.

Those rows are marked AUTO in the table, so you can tell them apart from ones you typed.

Rename the same thing twice and you still get one hop, not two: the first redirect is quietly re-pointed at the newest address.

Links from your old WooCommerce shop

If you moved here from WordPress and WooCommerce, Google still has your old shop addresses, and they keep working without any rules from you:

Old address	Where it sends people
/product/..., /product-category/..., /shop	Your home page, where the live competitions are
/cart	Checkout
/my-account/orders	My orders
/my-account/lost-password	Forgotten password
Anything else under /my-account	My account

Google is told each one has moved for good, so the old results drop out over the following weeks. A redirect you add yourself for the same address always wins, so you can still send one old product page to its new competition. If you have published a page of your own at /shop, /cart or /my-account, your page is shown instead.

When you do have to add one

Add a redirect by hand for an address that never existed on this site. The common case is a site you have moved from — an old WordPress site, say, where your competitions lived at /product/win-a-golf-r/. Nothing on this platform has ever served that address, so nothing can have set up its redirect for you. (Old WooCommerce addresses already go to your home page, as above; add a rule when you want one to land on a particular competition instead.)

1. Go to Site → SEO, then the Redirects tab.
2. Type the old address — /product/win-a-golf-r.
3. Type where to send them — /competitions/win-a-golf-r.
4. Click Add redirect.

Both boxes take an address, starting with a slash. You can paste a whole web address (https://oldsite.co.uk/product/win-a-golf-r/) and we take the part we need.

Capital letters, a trailing slash and anything after a ? are all ignored, so one redirect covers every version of the same link. That last one matters more than it sounds: ?utm_source=facebook tags get stuck on the end of shared links constantly, and you would otherwise need a separate rule for each one. Those tags are passed on to the new address, so your campaign tracking still works.

Reading the table

Column	What it tells you
Old address	The address someone is arriving at
Goes to	Where they end up
Source	AUTO if a rename created it, "Added by you" if you typed it
Times used	How many people this has caught, since it was created

Times used is the number worth watching after a move. A redirect climbing into the hundreds is one that is doing real work. A row still on zero weeks later is a link nobody had.

Use the search box to find a redirect by either address.

Delete one

Click the bin icon on the row and confirm. The old address goes straight back to showing "page not found", so only delete a redirect you are sure nobody is still using — check Times used first.

Addresses you cannot redirect

A redirect takes priority over the real page at that address — that is what makes it work. So the built-in parts of your site are off limits, and you will get an error if you try:

/login /register /account /checkout /payment /admin/winners /terms /privacy and the other built-in pages, plus your home page.

Redirecting a retired address to one of them is fine — it is only redirecting away from them that is blocked. An address that merely starts the same way, like /login-help, is yours to redirect.

What you cannot do here

• Send people to another website. Destinations have to be addresses on your own site.
• Use wildcards or patterns. One old address, one destination. Moving a hundred old URLs means a hundred rows.
• Point an address at itself, or set up a circle (/a goes to /b, /b goes back to /a). You will get an error saying so, with the loop written out. This is a guard, not a limitation — a circle would leave visitors bouncing between two addresses forever.
• Have two redirects from the same old address. If you need to change where one goes, delete it and add it again.

Set your site defaults

Your homepage in search

Two boxes with the same counters and the same live Google preview as the panel above. Leave them blank and your homepage uses your site name and tagline.

Unlike other pages, your homepage never has the site name added — whatever you type is the whole title.

Page titles

Pages with no title of their own get your site name added after a separator, as long as the whole thing still fits in Google's 60 characters. When it would not fit, the site name is left off and the page's own title is used on its own. Google cuts long titles short anyway, so the site name was the part getting lost. Pick which character:

‹ | - – — ·

An example under the picker shows the result. ‹ is the default; changing it changes every page on your site that has no title of its own, so it is worth a look at Page health afterwards.

Finished competitions

There is nothing to set here. A week after a competition finishes, its page asks Google to drop it from search results, so people searching stop landing on competitions they cannot enter. The week counts from the draw if it sold out and was drawn early.

The page itself keeps working for anyone with the link, so entrants can still check the result, and it shows a See live competitions button at the top. Your Winners pages are unaffected. To hide a competition sooner, use its own Hide from search engines switch.

Google takes a while to catch up: a page drops out the next time Google visits it, usually within a few weeks.

Renaming a page

Keep old links working is what sets up a redirect for you every time you change a page or competition address. It is on unless you turn it off, and leaving it on is almost always right.

Turn it off only if you are deliberately retiring addresses and want them to go to "page not found" — for example if you have been renaming things repeatedly while setting the site up and would rather not collect a redirect for every attempt. Redirects you already have keep working either way; they are all on the Redirects tab, and you can delete the ones you do not want.

Two things still happen with it switched off, because without them renaming would break your site rather than just skip a redirect:

• If a redirect already points at the address you are renaming to, it is removed. Otherwise your renamed page would send visitors away from its own address.
• If a redirect already points at the old address, it is updated to the new one, so it does not end up sending people to an address that no longer exists.

Neither creates anything new. If either removes a redirect you had typed yourself, it is recorded in your admin activity log.

Sitemap

A read-only card showing how many pages your site is handing to search engines, with a link to view the sitemap itself. It updates itself — there is nothing to set up.

The number here is smaller than the one on Page health, and that is correct. The sitemap lists your live competitions and the built-in pages. Finished competitions and your own content pages are still findable on Google — which is why Page health checks them — but they are not listed in the sitemap.

Set SEO on a competition as you edit it

You don't have to come to this page. Open any competition, and at the bottom of the Details tab there is a Search engines section with the same two boxes, the same counters, the same Google preview, and the same Hide from search engines switch. Whichever way you set them, you get the same result.

What this page will not do

• It does not check what Google actually thinks of your site. Nothing here talks to Search Console, and no ranking or keyword data is involved.
• It does not crawl your pages. Everything it reports comes from what you have typed into the platform.
• It does not change your addresses. It will keep an old one working (see Keep old links working), but renaming a page or a competition is still done on that page or competition.

Common problems

A competition's title in Google no longer ends with my site name. Your site name is left off any title it would push past 60 characters, so Google shows the part about the prize. Short titles still get it. If you want your site name on a particular page, write a meta title that includes it.

A competition still says "Title too long". The competition's own title is over 60 characters. Ask Compy for a shorter one, or write one yourself.

Every competition says "Title too short". Your competition titles are short and so is your site name — added together they still come under 30 characters. Either give the competitions fuller titles, or write a meta title for the ones that matter.

Two competitions show as duplicates. You have run the same competition twice, or duplicated one. Give one of them a meta title that distinguishes it, for example by adding the month.

The Points Store shows "Hidden from Google". That page asks not to be indexed. That is how the platform ships it and there is nothing to fix.

I renamed a competition and the old link still shows the old page. Give it a minute. Your site holds the redirect list briefly to keep pages fast, and the old address starts working as soon as that refreshes.

I have thousands of redirects and the older ones have stopped working. Your site uses up to 5,000 at once. Past that, the oldest stop working and an amber note appears above the table. Sort out the ones nobody uses — Times used shows which those are — and delete them.

I added a redirect and it says there is already one from that address. You can only send an old address to one place. Find the existing row on the Redirects tab — search for the old address — and delete it before adding yours.

I created a page and it immediately sends visitors somewhere else. There was a redirect from that address left over from before. Creating the page removes it automatically, so this should not happen — if it does, check the Redirects tab and delete any row whose Old address is your new page's address.

I saved a meta title and the site name disappeared from my browser tab. That is correct — a meta title is the whole title. Add your site name yourself if you want it there. The same applies to meta titles you set before this release: they used to get your site name added, and now they do not.