Search engines & sharing
Control how your site appears in Google results and when it's shared on social media.
Your weather site is built to be found: published sites get clean titles, structured data, a sitemap and social share previews out of the box. The Search engine & social card on your site's Settings page lets you tune how that looks - or opt out of search engines entirely.
What search engines and shares show
- Meta title: the page title shown in the browser tab, in Google results and on social shares. Leave it blank to use your site's title. About 60 characters works best (the field allows up to 70).
- Meta description: the summary search engines show under your title. Leave it blank to use your tagline. About 155 characters works best (up to 200 allowed).
- Share image: when someone shares your site on social media, the preview uses your header banner photo, or your logo if you haven't set a banner. Both are uploaded on the Appearance page.
Tip: name your place
Put your town or area in the title and description - for example "Ardooie weather - live conditions & records". Most people who find a station site search for the weather somewhere, and your structured data already tells search engines where your station is.
What's handled for you
For every published site, Pro Weather automatically provides:
- A sitemap (
/sitemap.xml) and robots.txt on your site's own address, including your custom domain. - Structured data (JSON-LD) describing your site and - when your station's coordinates are known - its location. This helps your site show up for local searches like "weather in your town".
- A canonical URL, so search engines index one address consistently.
Keeping your site out of search engines
Prefer to share your site privately? Turn on "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" in the same card. Your site stays reachable by anyone with the link, but asks Google and other search engines not to list it. This works on every plan.
The station showcase
Every published site is also listed on Pro Weather's public station showcase - a world map and directory of the stations running on the platform, and a free link back to your site. Each entry shows:
- your site's title and tagline, linking to your site (your custom domain when you have one);
- the station hardware it runs, and whether the data comes in through WeatherLink or is pushed by your own gateway;
- a deliberately coarse location: the region and country, for example Europe · Belgium, and a map dot rounded to about 10 km. Your station's exact coordinates are never published there.
Prefer not to be listed? Turn on "Hide this site from the Pro Weather station showcase" in the Search engine & social card. Your site drops off the showcase as soon as you save, and is otherwise unaffected.
The two switches are independent
Discouraging search engines does not take you off the showcase, and hiding from the showcase does not stop Google from finding your site. If you want a fully private site, turn on both.
Draft and expired sites are never indexed
Only published sites are indexable. While your site is a draft, or if a trial or subscription lapses, visitors see a Coming soon page and search engines are told not to index it.
Next steps
- Add Google Analytics to measure your visitors
- Use a custom domain
- Appearance & branding
