Cloudflare DNS + GitHub Pages: Custom Domain and SEO for Your al-folio Site

Running an al-folio site on GitHub Pages is a great setup — fast, free, and version-controlled. But by default your site lives at username.github.io, which isn’t great for branding or SEO. This post walks through connecting a custom domain via Cloudflare DNS, then configuring al-folio’s built-in SEO features to make sure search engines actually find and rank your content.

Part 1: Cloudflare DNS Setup

Prerequisites

• A registered domain (from any registrar — Namecheap, Google Domains, Porkbun, etc.)
• A Cloudflare account (free tier is fine)
• Your al-folio site deployed to GitHub Pages at username.github.io

Step 1: Add Your Domain to Cloudflare

1. Log in to cloudflare.com and click Add a Site.
2. Enter your domain (e.g. yourname.com) and choose the Free plan.
3. Cloudflare will scan your existing DNS records. Review them, then continue.
4. Cloudflare will give you two nameserver addresses, something like:

   aria.ns.cloudflare.com
   bob.ns.cloudflare.com
   

5. Go to your domain registrar and replace the existing nameservers with Cloudflare’s. This step hands DNS control to Cloudflare. Propagation can take up to 24 hours, but is usually much faster.

Step 2: Add DNS Records in Cloudflare

Once your domain is active in Cloudflare, navigate to DNS → Records and add the following.

A Records (apex domain)

Add four A records pointing your root domain (@) to GitHub Pages’ IP addresses:

Important: Set Proxy Status to DNS only (grey cloud), not Proxied (orange cloud). If you proxy through Cloudflare, GitHub Pages cannot provision a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate for your domain, which you need for the enforced HTTPS option.

CNAME Record (www subdomain)

This lets www.yourname.com resolve to your site. Replace username with your actual GitHub username.

Optional: IPv6 AAAA Records

GitHub Pages also supports IPv6. Adding these is good practice:

Step 3: Configure the Custom Domain in GitHub

1. In your GitHub repository, go to Settings → Pages.
2. Under Custom domain, enter your apex domain (e.g. yourname.com) and click Save.
3. GitHub will create (or update) a CNAME file at the root of your repo. Make sure this file is committed and not gitignored. For al-folio sites deployed via GitHub Actions, you may need to add this file manually to your repo root.
4. Wait a few minutes, then check the Enforce HTTPS checkbox. If it’s greyed out, DNS hasn’t fully propagated yet — give it another 10–30 minutes.

Verify DNS with dig

Once propagation is done, confirm your records are correct:

# Check A records
dig yourname.com +noall +answer -t A

# Expected output:
# yourname.com. 3600 IN A 185.199.108.153
# yourname.com. 3600 IN A 185.199.109.153
# yourname.com. 3600 IN A 185.199.110.153
# yourname.com. 3600 IN A 185.199.111.153

# Check CNAME for www
dig www.yourname.com +noall +answer -t CNAME

Step 4: Update _config.yml with Your Custom Domain

Open _config.yml in your al-folio repo and update the url field:

url: https://yourname.com # your custom domain, NOT username.github.io
baseurl: "" # leave empty for apex domains

This is important — al-folio uses url and baseurl to generate canonical URLs, Open Graph tags, and the sitemap. If these are wrong, your SEO metadata will point to the wrong domain.

Part 2: SEO Configuration in al-folio

Al-folio ships with several SEO features built in. Most of them just need the right values in _config.yml and your post front matter.

What al-folio gives you out of the box

• jekyll-seo-tag — generates <title>, <meta name="description">, Open Graph (og:), and Twitter Card tags on every page automatically.
• jekyll-sitemap — generates /sitemap.xml for search engine crawlers.
• robots.txt — included at the root with permissive crawl rules.
• Canonical URLs — built into the SEO tag plugin, preventing duplicate content penalties.

_config.yml SEO settings

Here are the key fields to fill in:

# Site identity
title: Your Name
first_name: First
last_name: Last
email: you@yourname.com
description: >
  Academic researcher and engineer. Writing about systems,
  machine learning, and the occasional DevOps rabbit hole.

# URL — must be your custom domain once Cloudflare is set up
url: https://yourname.com
baseurl: ""

# Keywords used in <meta name="keywords">
keywords: jekyll, academic, portfolio, machine-learning

# Language
lang: en

# Social — used in SEO tags and footer
social:
  name: Your Full Name
  links:
    - https://twitter.com/yourhandle
    - https://github.com/yourusername
    - https://linkedin.com/in/yourprofile

# Google Analytics (optional but useful for tracking search performance)
google_analytics: G-XXXXXXXXXX # your Measurement ID

# Google Search Console verification
google_site_verification: your-verification-token

The social.links array is picked up by jekyll-seo-tag and rendered as sameAs JSON-LD structured data, which helps Google associate your profiles across the web.

Per-post front matter for SEO

For each blog post, these front matter fields directly influence how the page is indexed and displayed in search results:

---
layout: post
title: "Your Post Title" # <title> tag and og:title
date: 2026-05-17
description: "A concise summary of what this post covers. Aim for
  150–160 characters — this is what appears in Google's
  search result snippets."
tags: [tag1, tag2, tag3]
categories: [category]
og_image: /assets/img/posts/your-preview-image.jpg # og:image for link previews
---

Tip on descriptions: Write these as if they’re ad copy. They don’t directly affect ranking, but a good description improves click-through rate from search results, which does.

Enabling Google Search Console

Once your domain is live:

1. Go to search.google.com/search-console.
2. Add a new property using your custom domain.
3. Google will ask you to verify ownership. The easiest method is the HTML tag approach — copy the content value from the meta tag Google provides, and paste it into _config.yml:

google_site_verification: abc123yourtokenhere

Al-folio’s _includes/head.html already outputs this tag when the field is set. Rebuild and push, then click Verify in Search Console.

1. Once verified, submit your sitemap:

https://yourname.com/sitemap.xml

Checking your sitemap and robots.txt

After deploying with your custom domain set in _config.yml, verify these are generating correctly:

https://yourname.com/sitemap.xml
https://yourname.com/robots.txt

The default robots.txt in al-folio looks like:

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://yourname.com/sitemap.xml

If you want to exclude certain pages (e.g. a /drafts/ path or /admin/), you can add Disallow rules here.

Structured Data (JSON-LD)

Al-folio doesn’t output rich structured data by default beyond what jekyll-seo-tag provides. If you want to add BlogPosting schema to individual posts (which can enable rich results in Google), add a _layouts/post.html override with a JSON-LD block:

<script type="application/ld+json">
  {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "BlogPosting",
    "headline": "Cloudflare DNS + GitHub Pages: Custom Domain and SEO for Your al-folio Site",
    "datePublished": "2026-05-17T00:00:00+00:00",
    "description": "Step-by-step guide to pointing a custom domain at your GitHub Pages site using Cloudflare DNS, and tuning your al-folio Jekyll theme for solid SEO.",
    "url": "https://crystalhansen.ca/blog/2026/cloudflare-dns-github-pages-seo-al-folio/",
    "author": {
      "@type": "Person",
      "name": "Crystal Hansen"
    }
  }
</script>

Quick Reference

Wrapping Up

The Cloudflare + GitHub Pages combination is hard to beat for a personal or academic site: free CDN, DDoS protection, and a clean DNS dashboard. The key gotcha is keeping records in DNS only mode so GitHub can handle HTTPS itself — don’t let Cloudflare proxy the connection until you have the SSL cert provisioned.

On the SEO side, al-folio handles the heavy lifting through jekyll-seo-tag and jekyll-sitemap. The main things left for you to do are fill in _config.yml properly, write good post description fields, and register with Google Search Console so you can actually track how your content performs in search.