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Bulk Metadata

By default, metadata is managed at the page level. See Authoring and Publishing Content for more information.

In some cases, it is useful to apply metadata en masse to a website. Common use cases include:

If you want to create metadata for many pages at once, create either an Excel workbook or a Google Sheets workbook in the root folder of your website in SharePoint or Google Drive.

The workbook should have only one worksheet and at least two columns as in the following image.

The column titled URL has the URL pattern of the pages that should get a particular metadata entry.

The wildcard * (the asterisk) can be used as a prefix or suffix, allowing for flexible matches on the URL pathname. Typical examples include /docs/** or **/docs/**.

Note: The metadata sheet is evaluated from top to bottom, site wide meta data set to ** must be before more specific entries.

For each metadata property, create a column in the worksheet and name it using the property you want to assign. Typical examples include template, theme, or robots.

Page-level metadata added via a metadata block takes precedence over bulk metadata. See the documents Authoring and Publishing Content and Metadata (block) for more information.

To explicitly remove metadata a "" can be used as a value. This will remove the element or set the corresponding attribute to "" for a particular path.

Example:

URL          Canonical
/**          ""


The example above will remove the <link rel="canonical"> from all pages by default, unless there is a specific override for example from a page metadata block.

Note: You need to preview / publish the metadata sheet in order to see changes reflected on your page.

Tip: Excel can be slow to update inside SharePoint. If you do not see your changes reflected in preview or publish, hard refresh (click into URL bar and refresh) the Excel document in your browser and preview should work as expected.

Advanced Metadata Properties

In addition to standard metadata properties, you can now configure advanced properties to control aspects like canonical URLs and page titles at scale. These properties are set within your metadata.xlsx file, allowing for more granular control over your site's metadata.

canonical:extension

The canonical:extension property allows you to define the file extension for canonical URLs. This is particularly useful for ensuring consistent and SEO-friendly canonical URLs across your site, even if the actual file paths do not include the extension.

To use it, add a column named canonical:extension to your metadata.xlsx sheet. For example, to set all URLs to have an .html extension as their canonical form, you would add an entry like this:

title:suffix

The title:suffix property enables you to automatically append a specified suffix to the <title> tag of your pages. This is often used for branding, to add consistent information, or to meet specific SEO requirements across a set of pages.

To implement this, add a column named title:suffix to your metadata.xlsx sheet. For instance, to add | Adobe to the end of all page titles, your entry would look like this:

Additional Metadata

When having metadata that is managed by several teams it is not practical to keep them all in the same metadata files. Multi metadata support is possible by configuring the all the metadata files that need to be taken into account in the /.helix/config.xlsx file:

The order of the entries in the list dictates the order of how the data is applied. The final order of the metadata is as follows:

If there is metadata configured in the /.helix/config.xlsx:

if there is no configured order:

Note that individual metadata properties are overwritten but never deleted. For example, if the /metadata.json defines a property title, the same property in /metadata-2nd.json will overwrite the value, but only if it is not empty.