Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Can MadCap Flare WebHelp be made SEO Friendly?
-
A team member is porting over documentation from a .org wiki that will be placed on the company's root domain. The problem with MadCap is that it uses frames as well as javascript navigation. Has anyone encountered this problem before?
I'm unfamiliar with the software and the project is pretty far into the pipeline at this point (I'm new at the company as well). Any advice on work-arounds or alternatives would be greatly appreciated.
-
This will be part of my webinar today on SEO for Madcap Flare. Here's a sample project to show how we were able to make a more crawlable webhelp: http://flarestrap.com/.
I've put a demo of the output there and have a sample Flare project for download.
-
Anthony, I know the response is quite delayed, but I encountered this exact problem a few years ago. We were able to make Madcap Flare SEO friendly. (See Bomgar support docs.) We did this by creating a masterpage that functioned as a website template, like you tend to have in Dreamweaver projects. When we launched our webhelp, we made sure that the navigational links pointing to it were to the first topic, rather than to the default page with the frames and javascript navigation.
Now we get a lot of organic traffic to the webhelp section, even from non-customers.
I'll be doing a webinar on the topic later this month to discuss how we did it.
https://www.madcapsoftware.com/demos/signup.aspx?id=1137728001111021845 -
Hi Anthony,
Sorry to say I don't have a good answer for you, but wanted to throw in my 2 cents. I don't have hands-on experience with MadCap Flare, but reading about other experiences on the web seem to indicate that it's a tough, if not impossible, to properly optimize for SEO.
http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11874
http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=8637
The good news is there seem to be a few workarounds in these forums, but nothing golden. There has been some evidence lately that Google crawls iFrames and passes link juice through them, but I suspect you'll still encounter some difficult problems.
My only suggestion would be to join the aforementioned madcapsoftware forums and try to gleam the best advice from others who've faced the same situation.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can subdomains hurt your primary domain's SEO?
Our primary website https://domain.com has a subdomain https://subDomain.domain.com and on that subdomain we have a jive-hosted community, with a few links to and fro. In GA they are set up as different properties but there are many SEO issues in the jive-hosted site, in which many different people can create content, delete content, comment, etc. There are issues related to how jive structures content, broken links, etc. My question is this: Aside from the SEO issues with the subdomain, can the performance of that subdomain negatively impact the SEO performance and rank of the primary domain? I've heard and read conflicting reports about this and it would be nice to hear from the MOZ community about options to resolve such issues if they exist. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BHeffernan1 -
How does Infinite Scrolling work with unique URLS as users scroll down? And is this SEO friendly?
I was on a site today and as i scrolled down and viewed the other posts that were below the top one i read, i noticed that each post below the top one had its own unique URL. I have not seen this and was curious if this method of infinite scrolling is SEO friendly. Will Google's spiders scroll down and index these posts below the top one and index them? The URLs of these lower posts by the way were the same URLs that would be seen if i clicked on each of these posts. Looking at Google's preferred method for Infinite scrolling they recommend something different - https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html . Welcome all insight. Thanks! Christian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sundance_Kidd0 -
Advanced SEO - What would you do after you run out of keywords?
Hello! Our company has been growing in terms of traffic and ranking well for a couple of years but we are now kind of stagnating because we just don't know what to do next. We have a good blog - and with our blogs, we have been targeting all major keywords with their related keywords as a bucket. - "keyword theme / page" for a long time. But it seems we now don't have any major keyword theme to write about. What is worse is that we don't see any traffic growth since 2014 September. (although we added many good blogs) So what would do you when you run out of keywords? or keyword themes? Would you just keep pumping in more blogs and hope that you get more clicks? or at some point, you just don't care about keywords and write whatever relevant to your site? Wouldn't it hurt our site if we create similar keyword themed pages? (like regurgitating our keywords?) or even same keyword targeting pages? You must have similar experience if you are an owner of a niche site. Can you please share your experience with this kind of headaches? Thank you and look forward to your comments.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joony3 -
SEO Advice for Angular JS
We are changing our homepage (and gradually the rest of the site) to Angular JS.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter
In order not to lose anything in terms of SEO we are implementing Hashbangs + escaped fragment snapshots. Are there any other SEO considerations you think we should have and/or additional elements that we could add to the page to improve it in terms of SEO?0 -
Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Migrating online store to subdomain using shopify and effects on seo and energy down the road for seo
I'm looking for some clarity... Looking at using Shopify for an existing online store that we have to migrate. Setting up the store with shopify means we will be using a subdomain such as shop.mywebsite.com instead of mywebsite.com/shop. The following are points to consider when responding The client currently has an online store, however it's a proprietary shopping store and CMS that has since gone defunct and they need to migrate to an alternative in order to survive online against new CMS systems that allow the site and its content to be better optimized. There is a lot of existing SEO done on the current site that we don't want to loose PR on. There is roughly 2000 products Client has a fixed budget, dealing with checkout issues, custom work and various other "bugs" seems to be easier controlled with Shopify...thus budget can be used more on content/strategy and migration We want to run the main site in Wordpress and are wanting to use Shopify since it supports a gateway, has great features and seems like it would allow us to get more bang for the buck and can focus more on the main site and content strategy and drive traffic to the subdomain store if needed Or main concern is the effort of migrating 2000+ products to shopify and the traffic and PR it gives the current site will have a negative effect on the main domain itself. Should we really be considering this path? The domain is diveidc.com One main benefit to the subdomain is the ability to clearly segment products from the service portion of the site in the analytics and focus 2 clear strategies and track it in a very defined manner. We're really on the fence with this...any thoughts are welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MAGNUMCreative0 -
Link Age as SEO factor?
Hi Guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VividLime
I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspx We will be doing the standard redirects etc However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24s He says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect. Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot' In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space. So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect. -But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about. So the main question:
Is link age factor in rankings ? If I update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?0 -
Will having image lightbox with content on a web page SEO friendly?
This website is done in CMS. Will having lightbox pop up with content be SEO friendly? If you go to the web page and click on the images at the bottom of the page. There are lightbox that will display information. Will these lightbox content information be crawl by Google? Will it be consider as content for the url http://jennlee.com/portfolio/bran.. Thanks, John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VizionSEO990