SEO for Virtual Posts

I’m eager to know this as well – but as I far as I could tell by my logic is that google simply can’t get these indexed. Since they aren’t to be found in the site’s sitemap (cause they are virtual posts and not actual post types to be found by wp’s ecosystem).

Perhaps if you were to link to each virtual post on the index or listing page… In that case google could pick it up and index it, since it follows all links on your site. But otherwise, I don’t think the pages will be indexed at all.

But I’m curious to the answer of the plugin’s developer.

Airpress doesn’t have anything to do with sitemap.xml

It is possible to customize your sitemap.xml file, so you could add an index of Airpress/Airtable records, but that’s not something Airpress does automatically.

What I do for SEO requirements on sites that use Airpress is to modify the page template PHP file to include the exact OG and META tags that I want. If you’re using Yoast this also requires disabling some Yoast features on the Airpress Virtual Post pages to avoid conflicting meta tags.

Airpress is a fairly low-level tool requiring knowledge of PHP and WordPress internals to do anything beyond some basic ‘virtual page’ stuff.

To follow up on my own comment: From a strictly technically standpoint, SEO is simply the process of adding tags to your HTML (or XML in the case of sitemap.xml). So using WordPress and Airpress you can create a template page and populate anything on that page with anything from Airtable. Exactly how you do this depends on your specific setup.

@chetmac @catalinoanca

I just want to add something that i figured out with the setup i was using. I still have Airpress on my site but am not actively using it anymore 1) because i was not able to use the Airpress short codes within the header tags to add the needed meta tags for SEO. 2) when i tried using Yoast it actually made my “Catalog” page disappear. 3) I am using GoDaddy WordPress hosting and i noticed at least once every night that when i would visit my site, it would be unavailable for a minute or two but no error logs on the server side or within the WordPress debugging logs showed any sign of the site actually being down. I think that particular issue was due to the caching that Airpress does. but that is beyond the scope of this topic.

For the sitemap, I tried two different plugins to try and build a sitemap automatically of my virtual pages. Yoast SEO and the Google XML Sitemap, neither of these plugins would add my virtual pages to the sitemap that it generated even though i had a “catalog” page that had links to each product page. I then tried https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ . The free platform that you do not have to create an account for actually generated a sitemap with all of my product pages listed. I then free created an account with them so that it would generate a new sitemap everyday automatically. BUT, that sitemap that it would generate automatically did not have the virtual pages listed.

I am not sure if that helps any and i know that part of this is beyond the scope of the topic but i just wanted to add input for what i have experienced.