Article SEO settings

Help center articles can be a real source of organic traffic. Ochre exposes the SEO knobs you would expect, with defaults that work for most teams. Tune them when the article matters.

Where to find them

Open any article and look at the sidebar. The SEO panel collapses by default. Expand it to see every field.

Help center URLs

Articles render at two equivalent URLs:

• Apex: https://ochrehq.com/help/<workspace-slug>/<article-slug>
• Subdomain: https://<workspace-slug>.ochrehq.com/help/<article-slug>

Both work, both auto-canonicalize to the same content. Cross-article links inside Ochre use the apex form (/help/ochre/<slug>) because it is portable across workspaces.

The fields

SEO title

Up to 60 characters. This is what shows up in Google's blue link. If you leave it blank, Ochre uses the article title plus your help center name.

Write it for the searcher, not for you. "How to reset your password" beats "Password Reset Procedure - Acme Help".

SEO description

140 to 160 characters. Shows under the blue link in search results. Keep it specific. Mention the action and the outcome. If it is longer than 160 characters, Google truncates with an ellipsis.

If you leave it blank, Ochre uses the article summary.

OG image

The 1200x630 image that shows when someone pastes the URL into Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn, or iMessage. Defaults to your help center's social card.

You can override per article. Custom OG images noticeably improve click-through on social.

Meta robots

Controls indexing. Choices:

• index, follow (default). Show in search, follow links.
• noindex, follow. Hidden from search, but Google can still crawl and follow links.
• index, nofollow. Show in search, do not pass link equity from outbound links.
• noindex, nofollow. Hidden and dead-end.

Set to noindex for partner-only articles, holding pages, or anything still in flux.

Canonical URL

If this article is the canonical version of content that also lives elsewhere, leave canonical empty. Ochre generates a self-canonical.

If your article is a copy of something on your blog or main marketing site, set the canonical URL to the original. Search engines will treat the other URL as the source of truth and will not penalize you for duplicate content.

Slug

The path after /help/<workspace-slug>/. Must be unique within your workspace. Lowercase, hyphens, no spaces.

Changing the slug on a published article breaks inbound links. If you must change it, set up a redirect or update the canonical URL to point at the new location. See Article visibility and gating for status changes that do not break URLs.

SEO keywords

Free-form chips. These do not affect ranking on Google directly, but Ochre's internal search and AI retrieval use them as soft signals. Three to seven keywords is plenty. Do not stuff.

Cover image

Distinct from OG image. The cover renders at the top of the article and in card grids on category pages. Use a real screenshot or product visual when you can. Generic stock photos hurt more than they help.

How retrieval interacts with SEO

Two things to know.

First, the AI agent does not read SEO description or keywords as primary content. It indexes the article body and the title. Get the body right and SEO follows.

Second, articles with low helpful votes get downweighted in AI retrieval, regardless of SEO. The SEO settings only affect what search engines and humans see. See Article voting and The brain: KB graph.

Sitemap interaction

If the sitemap is enabled, every article with index, follow gets included automatically. Articles set to noindex are excluded from the sitemap as well.

Hreflang and translations

Ochre does not auto-translate articles. If you maintain multiple language versions, write them as separate articles in separate categories and use the canonical URL field to link them. Native multilingual support is on the roadmap.

Practical tips

A few small things that compound:

• Keep slugs short. csat-overview beats customer-satisfaction-overview-and-introduction.
• Use the same primary keyword in title, H2, and the first paragraph. Do not keyword-stuff the rest.
• Cross-link 2 to 5 related articles per piece. Internal links help both rankings and AI retrieval.
• Update the article when the product changes. Stale articles tank votes fast.

Auditing

Look at Article analytics every month. Pay attention to articles with high views and low helpful votes. They are the ones search engines like and customers do not. Rewrite those first.

Default behavior is sane

If you set zero SEO fields, Ochre still ships a fine help center. The defaults are:

• Title: "Article title - Help center name"
• Description: article summary
• Robots: index, follow
• Canonical: self
• OG image: help center default

You can ship the whole help center without touching the SEO panel. Override only when an article matters enough to deserve the attention.

Related

• Article visibility and gating
• Article analytics
• Article voting
• Help center sitemap