Collection Page Templates - Can they be left blank but used in SEO?

Design help CMS
1

I see each Collection Template has a URL. If I leave my CMS Collection Pages empty (and style the collection list items on the actual Pages), will the blank CMS Collection Page Templates cause SEO confusion, errors, etc? Or do I need to add something on the blank template pages?

Here is my public share link: https://preview.webflow.com/preview/white-party-website?utm_medium=preview_link&utm_source=designer&utm_content=white-party-website&preview=3172a97e6668583d296db21bd6ec05ff&workflow=preview

2

Collection page templates display individual collection item information, so if you’re only using the data within static pages then I’d recommend you add the code below to prevent search engines from crawling/indexing the page entirely:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

This would go in your page settings within the tag area:

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3

Thanks Mike, and sorry - first website. can I treat a CMS Page Template like a regular Page, and make it part of the whole sites navigation? None of the videos talked about how best to use them.

Thanks again,
Michael

4

No worries, we’re all here to help out as much as possible so don’t hesitate to ask questions!

CMS Collection Page links currently need to be treated like external links with manual linking (ex: “/your-collection/some-collection-item”). Unfortunately there isn’t currently anyway to link to any specific collection item like you can with other static pages.

This is a fine workaround for the moment, but that means that if you update the slug on a linked collection item you would need to also manually update the page link (or rely on a redirect)—having a “dynamic” link that changes based on the collection item’s current slug would be preferred.

That said, within Collection Lists you’re able to link to any of the items by including a link and selecting the “Current Item” dropdown option from under the purple Collection Page section:

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This is useful is you want to create a dynamic linklist of sorts for your collection items (maybe in a dropdown or the footer) but you can also hijack the functionality to create a single link by filtering your Collection List element to show only a particular item.

Hopefully that helps, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions :+1: