Vol. I · October 26, 2026

Freight Broker NewsThe Business and Technology Behind Freight Brokerage.

Operator notes

Search setup

How Freight Broker News handles canonical URLs, sitemaps, feeds, and search-engine verification. Operator notes, not a ranking claim.

Canonical URLs

Public URLs use the apex, https://freightbrokernews.com, with no trailing slash. The homepage canonical is https://freightbrokernews.com, not https://freightbrokernews.com/. Article paths such as /news/freight-broker-technology-stack stay as they were published. www redirects to the apex. /about-us redirects to /about. /feed.xml and /atom.xml redirect to /rss.xml.

Sitemaps and the feed

sitemap.xml lists public pages and every public story. news-sitemap.xml lists the same stories with each story’s original publication_date. Google’s news-sitemap guide asks for roughly the last two days and says older URLs should come out of that file. This archive was published from 21 October 2026 through 26 October 2026, so the news sitemap currently includes every public story rather than hiding the launch pieces. Those dates were not changed. Publishing the file does not enroll the site in Google News.

rss.xml is the article feed. llms.txt describes the publication for automated readers. It is not a ranking signal.

Crawlers

robots.txt allows / for Googlebot, Bingbot, and the other named crawlers, and it disallows /api/ and /newsletter/unsubscribe. Search crawlers are not blocked.

Verification and analytics

Set these in the Vercel project for production. Leave them empty until you have the real value. Do not commit them.

  • NEXT_PUBLIC_GOOGLE_SITE_VERIFICATION — the Google Search Console HTML-tag content value. In Search Console, add the property https://freightbrokernews.com, choose the HTML tag method, and paste only the content token.
  • NEXT_PUBLIC_BING_SITE_VERIFICATION — the Bing Webmaster msvalidate.01 content value.
  • DNS verification, if you prefer it to a meta tag, is a TXT record at the apex. Use the exact host and value Search Console or Bing shows. This repository does not store that record.
  • NEXT_PUBLIC_GA_ID — a GA4 measurement ID that starts with G-. The tag loads only when that variable matches. No ID is hardcoded.
  • INDEXNOW_KEY — an 8 to 128 character key you generate. The site serves it at /{key}.txt. After a publish, run npm run indexnow. Nothing is pinged when the key is unset.

Social profile URLs are not attached to the publisher markup. Add them only when the accounts exist.