SEO#

Waterhole includes basic SEO metadata and external link handling that you can customize via configuration.

Waterhole includes a set of sensible defaults so your forum pages look good in search results and when shared:

• Page titles with your forum name appended.
• Meta descriptions (auto-derived when possible, with a configurable fallback).
• OpenGraph tags for title, description, URL, site name, and image (using a post's first image).
• Twitter card tags for rich social previews.
• robots handling for pages marked as noindex.
• JSON-LD structured data based on the page type (website, article, profile).
• External links marked with rel="nofollow ugc" by default.

Configuration#

Global defaults live in config/waterhole/seo.php:

• default_description for pages without a specific description.
• default_og_image for social previews.

External Link Rel Attributes#

By default, external links are rendered with rel="nofollow ugc" and target="_blank". You can adjust this behavior in config/waterhole/seo.php:

• nofollow_allow is a list of domains that should not receive nofollow.
• nofollow_rel is the rel attribute for external links not on the allowlist.