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
-
Menus, Ecommerce & SEO
Hi Our Dev team have updated our website with a new menu structure, they have given us 2 options to choose from. 1st option I think is better for SEO - this will be showing top 8 categories and then subcategories once you hover over category 1. Not much change from our current structure, just a slightly different layout. (I have added an image example of what option1 will look like) 2nd option - is preferred by management - shows all 24 categories & no subcategories. My question is, will removing the current subcategories from the main menu make them lose rankings & make them harder to rank in future? I'm guessing everything will move down a level in the structure and lost page authority... Does anyone have any articles/case studies to prove this point? Any help is much appreciated 🙂 Becky DKzgD
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
How have your SEO Audits evolved over time?
Hi guys, SEO Audits used to be so focused on the basics like title tags, meta descriptions etc. but now more than ever, SEO is a discipline which encompasses everything from content marketing to UX design. Would be great to hear from everyone how their audit templates have evolved over time to keep up with the latest updates in SEO and algorithm changes! Which new sections have you added and which have you removed?! Cheers, Daniel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daniel_Morgan0 -
Can links be hidden?
I was wondering if anyone can help me with some advice on agency work. We have just employed a new SEO agency to conduct work on one of our websites. I took a look on OSE and GWT to see if we had any new links since the agency started working (1 month ago) but there's was nothing new. When l asked for an update as to what link building efforts had been completed last month, l was told they don't give out a list of links as it could compromise the agencies techniques. They told me that they use software to hide links form link aggregators so that our competitors don't know what we are doing. Can anybody confirm that such software exists or is this agency just taking us for a ride? If there is such a software, could this not hinder what links the search engines could see? Any comments would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield0 -
Link Building: What Can I Reasonably Expect from SEO Firm
Dear Moz Community: I am considering hiring the SEO firm that conducted a web site audit for my company. The audit was very serious and thorough. Out of 400 domains linking to my site, the audit identified 40% as toxic, 45% as suspicious and only 5% as good quality. The SEO firm believes the poor link profile is very much holding back organic ranking and traffic. I am considering signing a six month contract to have them remove the toxic and suspicious links and also, build new quality links. Basically I have the following questions: -The SEO firm hopes to build 5-10 very high quality incoming links to my site per month. Is this a reasonable number? They claim that quantity is much more important than quality. -In the six month campaign, I will be paying for one month of research by the SEO provider before the link building kicks in earnest. In fact I will only get five months of link building despite paying for six months of service. Is this fair? -Is the removal of toxic links and the development of 25-50 new quality links and enough to improve ranking and traffic over six months? The site currently receives 4,000 visitors from organic search results per month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Note that at the moment the site has only about 20 "quality" links. I would hate to exhaust my budget after six months with no tangible improvement! I would very much like to hear of anyone's experience or input regarding reasonable expectations regarding hiring an SEO firm for link building campaigns. Thanks!!!
Alan0 -
Web domain hurt seo?
does having the "web" prefix in the domain name, such as in web.pennies.com/copper hurt SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh1230 -
Seo App on Mobile
Hi all i am learning seo mobile app on google play and itune , I'm finding some tips or experience to seo there. Please tell me some advise .Thanks all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anhlebksp0 -
If I hired you/your company to do my SEO ...
If i hired you or your company to do SEO for my site (http://goo.gl/XUH3f) what would be the first steps you'd take? I'm pretty sure i've covered all of the basics myself, I'm just left trying to figure out what i should do next... rankings have been going up and down for the last few weeks, but even when they're up, they're not high enough 🙂 (and then they go back down anyway) ... I know some of you are going to say build links, please at least give me an example of one or two sites you'd try to get to link to mine... I'm open to any advice or feedback as I'm just a website owner who's been doing their own SEO & learning on the fly... Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
How can we minimize the SEO impact during a major platform migration?
We are preparing for a major platform migration with an ecommerce client. The website is in the range of 7000 pages. During this migration, all URLs will change due to differences in the platform and improvements to the site structure. Unfortunately, they run on a Microsoft server, so doing 301 redirects also tends to be a painful process. What can we do to minimize the initial dent this puts in the website traffic? We are prepared to submit XML sitemaps to Google and Bing as soon as the new site is live. writing 301 redirects for all pages which have inbound links (this is tough to automate due to the URL structures). In the long run, we expect the new platform, URL structure, and site architecture to be a huge improvement for our organic rankings. The client and we are worried about the transition period though! Any tips or advice to help us through it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | outofboundsdigital0