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Avoiding Duplicate-Content SEO in Custom Portals

When you deploy your own Walrus Sites portal, you might expose the same site under multiple hostnames:

  • A SuiNS domain: A human-readable names registered on-chain, for example snowreads.wal.app.

  • Base36: Subdomains derived directly from the site object ID, for example 1myb…xd.portal.com.

  • Custom domains: Your own domain obtained by a third-party service, for example example.com.

Search engines treat the same content served at multiple hosts as duplicates, which can dilute ranking signals.

The official wal.app portal avoids this issue by only serving SuiNS domains, with base36 and custom domains disabled. If you run your own portal and enable base36 or a custom domain, you must take steps to signal a canonical host.

These steps do not require any changes to the Walrus Sites portal itself but rather are site-level fixes applied as HTML tags or HTTP headers that you can add when hosting your own portal.

Example​

You run a site that is reachable at both https://example.wal.app/math (SuiNS) and https://example.com/math (custom domain). A web crawler sees identical content at 2 different URLs and might treat them as duplicates.

To solve this, add a canonical hint in the HTML <head> so crawlers know which host to index:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/math" />

Canonical host policy: Choose 1 hostname type per site. Custom domain > SuiNS > base36 is a good priority ranking. All other hosts should include canonical hints pointing to that choice.

**Base36 subdomains: Disable if not needed: B36_DOMAIN_RESOLUTION_SUPPORT=false. If enabled, add canonical hints (<link rel="canonical"> or Link: rel="canonical"). Optionally, block them from indexing with `X-Robots-Tag: noindex

Custom domains: Setting BRING_YOUR_OWN_DOMAIN=true makes the portal serve only your configured custom domain (single-site mode). Other domains, including SuiNS and base36, are not resolved by that portal. It's always a good practice to add canonical hints in your HTML or headers pointing to your chosen custom domain to avoid duplicate indexing across different hosts.

Multiple SuiNS names → 1 site: This can happen permissionlessly. If you own the extra names, add canonical hints in your site HTML to point to your preferred domain.