Horsify Knowledge Base - SEO for Club Sites and Riding Schools

Overview

Your club site is built to be found by search engines. Every club subdomain (e.g. yourclub.horsify.club) automatically gets the technical groundwork search engines expect — a robots file, a sitemap, search-friendly meta tags and structured data — and you control the title and description for each page you publish.

Two things matter most, and neither is a setting: replace the placeholder text on your seeded pages, and fill in your organisation profile. Both are explained below.

What's Handled Automatically

Every club site gets these without any setup on your part:

robots.txt — each club subdomain serves its own robots file that welcomes search engines and points them to your sitemap. AI assistants and answer engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews and others) are welcomed by name, so your club's content can be read and cited by them.
Sitemap — a sitemap is generated for your subdomain listing your published CMS pages. Home is given top priority, with your other published pages listed alongside it. If you run a riding school, your booking front door (/riding-school), instructor profiles and /book-now page are listed too, when those are switched on in your navigation.
Search and social meta tags — each published page carries a title, description, canonical URL, and Open Graph / Twitter Card tags so it looks right in search results and when shared on social media.
Structured data — pages emit JSON-LD describing your club (name, sport, address, contact details, social links), your upcoming events, and — for riding schools — your lesson catalogue and instructors. This is what feeds rich results and gives AI answer engines something concrete to cite.
AI content guide — each club subdomain serves an llms.txt file summarising the club, its pages and its upcoming events for AI assistants.

What's in the sitemap: only your own club-site pages. Your organisation profile and individual event pages are deliberately left out, because the same content is served on the main Horsify site (horsify.com.au), which carries far more search authority. Those main-site pages, plus your club hub at horsify.com.au/clubs/{your-slug}, are what search engines are pointed at for your club's events, results and directory listing.

The Placeholder-Text Rule (Read This One)

When your club site is created, every page is pre-filled with example copy — "We are a vibrant equestrian community…", a literal [YEAR], and a placeholder contact block (123 Equestrian Way, info@yourclub.com.au). That text is identical on every new club site, so a page still showing it has nothing unique for Google to rank.

Horsify therefore excludes any page that still contains the placeholder copy from your sitemap, and serves it as noindex — the page works normally for visitors, it is simply not offered to search engines. The same applies to a page with fewer than about 40 words of real text.

As soon as you replace the placeholder text with your own, the page becomes indexable again. Nothing to switch on, and no other page is affected. If a page you have written is not appearing in search, check it for leftover placeholder text and that it has more than a sentence or two of content.

Pages that are excluded still pass link value through to your real pages, events and store, so nothing is lost in the meantime.

The SEO Fields You Control

When you edit a page in your club site, the page settings panel lets you set:

SEO Title — the title search engines and browser tabs display (this can differ from the on-page heading).
SEO Description — the short summary shown beneath your title in search results.

Both are optional. If you leave them blank, Horsify writes them for you from your club name, discipline and location — for a club, something like Your Club | Dressage | Bundaberg, QLD; for a riding school, a title built around "horse riding lessons" and your suburb, because that is what people actually search for. These generated values are kept inside the lengths Google displays (about 60 characters for a title, 160 for a description).

Anything you type in is used exactly as written — Horsify never pads or trims a title or description you set yourself. So set them where you have something better to say than the generated version, and aim for a unique, descriptive title on each page and a description of roughly 150–160 characters.

Because the generated versions draw on your organisation profile, filling in your club's description, discipline, suburb and state in your organisation settings improves the search snippet on every page at once. It is usually the highest-value ten minutes you can spend.

FAQs Earn Rich Results

If you add an FAQs block to a page, its questions and answers are automatically published as FAQ structured data. This is the single richest thing you can give an AI answer engine — question-and-answer content is what they quote directly. A short FAQs block on your home or membership page is well worth adding.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console lets you monitor how your site appears in Google and check for indexing problems. How you set it up depends on which address you use:

If You Use Your Own Custom Domain

Because you own the domain and control its DNS, you can add it to Search Console and verify it yourself, then submit your sitemap and monitor performance. This is the recommended path if you want your own Search Console access.

Add your domain (e.g. www.yourclub.com.au) as a property in Google Search Console.
Verify ownership using a DNS TXT record. (Google's other methods — uploading an HTML file, or pasting a verification meta tag — need access to the site's files or page head, which a Horsify-hosted site does not give you. DNS is the one that works.)
Submit your sitemap at https://www.yourclub.com.au/sitemap.xml.
Use the Indexing and Performance reports to track coverage and search visibility.

If You Use the `yourclub.horsify.club` Subdomain

The horsify.club domain is managed centrally by Horsify, so you can't self-verify a horsify.club subdomain in your own Search Console — verification requires control of the domain's DNS, which sits with Horsify. Your subdomain's robots file and sitemap still work automatically, and search engines can crawl and index your published pages without any action from you. If you need Search Console reporting for your club, use a custom domain (above), or contact Horsify support.

Setting Expectations on a New Subdomain

horsify.club is a young domain, and each club subdomain starts as a brand-new site with no search history of its own. Expect Google to crawl your pages fairly quickly but to take weeks or months before ranking them for your club's name — especially if your club already has an established Facebook page or older website that Google has trusted for years.

This is why your club hub on horsify.com.au/clubs/{your-slug} matters: it carries your events, results, committee and a link to your branded site, and it sits on Horsify's established domain rather than a new one. It is created for you automatically. Linking to it, and to your club site, from your Facebook page and any existing website is the fastest way to build the reputation both need.

Moving From an Old Website: Redirects

If your club's website used to live somewhere else (WordPress, Wix or similar), its old page addresses are still in Google's results, in people's bookmarks and in links from other sites. A redirect sends each old address to the right page on your Horsify site, so those links keep working and Google moves the old page's place in search results across to the new one.

Open Redirects in your site's group of the organiser menu, next to Pages, News, Theme and Navigation. Only your organisation's administrators can manage redirects.

Adding a Redirect

In Old address, paste the full link from your old site, or just the part after the domain (e.g. /category/childrens-lessons/).
In Goes to, choose the page on your site it should open. Start typing to pick one of your pages.
Tick Also redirect everything under it if the old address is a whole section. The rest of the address is kept, so with /category going to /, the old /category/dressage goes to /dressage. One redirect covers the whole section.
Click Add redirect.

Each redirect in the list has an edit button, a delete button and a Try it link so you can check where it lands.

Adding Several at Once

Open Add several at once and paste one redirect per line: the old address, then the new one, separated by a space, comma or tab. Two columns copied from a spreadsheet paste straight in. End an old address with /* to redirect everything under it. Lines you have already added are skipped, and any line that can't be added is listed with the reason and left in the box so you can fix it.

How Redirects Behave

Every redirect is permanent (a "301"), which is the kind search engines carry rankings across.
Old addresses match regardless of capital letters or a trailing slash.
The new address must be a page on your own site.
Horsify won't save a redirect that would cause a problem: one for your home page or Horsify's own addresses, a second redirect for the same old address, one that would hide one of your existing pages, one that sends visitors round in a circle, or one that points at an address that is itself redirected. In that last case, send it straight to the final page instead.
You can have up to 1,000 redirects.

Things to Know

Redirects only reach visitors once your own domain points at Horsify. Until then, people visiting your old address still reach your old website. See Setting Up a Custom Domain.
Old addresses that differ only by what comes after a ? (e.g. /?p=123) can't be redirected.
Redirects don't show how many times they have been used.

Tips for Better Search Visibility

Replace every scrap of the placeholder copy — this is the one that decides whether a page can be indexed at all.
Complete your organisation profile (description, discipline, suburb, state, contact details) — it feeds the generated titles, descriptions and structured data on every page.
Fill in a clear SEO Title and SEO Description on the pages you most want found; leave them blank elsewhere and let Horsify generate them.
Add an FAQs block where you have real questions members ask.
Give each page a short, descriptive slug (lowercase, hyphenated).
Use one main heading per page, then sub-headings in order.
Keep your content current — publish real, useful pages rather than empty placeholders.
Link between your own pages so visitors (and search engines) can navigate them, and link to your club site from your Facebook page and any existing website.

Support

For SEO questions:

Check the page for leftover placeholder text — that is the most common reason a page is missing from search.
If you use a custom domain, check Google Search Console for indexing errors.
Confirm your site is reachable and your pages are published.
Contact Horsify support for further help.\n\n---\n\nSource: wiki/features/CLUB_SITE_SEO.md \nLast synced: 2026-10-06 06:11:05 UTC

SEO for Club Sites and Riding Schools