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 you index a Google doc?
We have updated and added completely new content to our state pages. Our old state content is sitting in a our Google drive. Can I make these public to get them indexed and provide a link back to our state pages? In theory it sounds like a great link building strategy... TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE1 -
Lightboxes and SEO
Do lightboxes (AKA popup boxes when you click "learn more" type CTAs) have any negative effect on SEO? We are looking at revamping our sites to have more of a tiled approach, and a lightbox with summary content popping out with additional CTAs, directing to pages with more information or free trial pages. Is there any downside to this approach from an organic perspective? is there anything specific to keep in mind when creating these if not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
Do Page Anchors Affect SEO?
Hi everyone, I've been researching for the past hour and I cannot find a definitive answer anywhere! Can someone tell me if page anchors affect SEO at all? I have a client that has 9 page anchors on one landing page on their website - which means if you were to scroll through their website, the page is really really long! I always thought that by using page anchors instead of sending users through to a dedicated landing page, ranking for those keywords makes it harder because a search spider will read all the content on that landing page and not know how to rank for individual keywords? Am I wrong? The client in particular sells furniture, so on their landing page they have page anchors that jump the user down to "tables" or "chairs" or "lighting" for example. You can then click on one of the product images listed in that section of the page anchor and go through to an individual product page. Can anyone shed any light on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz1 -
CDN for SEO (or not)?
Does CDN impact on SEO or not? There seems conflicting ideas as to whether they impact positively or negatively, I realise that if the page loads quicker this is a good thing for SEO and usability of course. Does Google see CDN as just cheating and a get-around for not doing the work from the ground up and using good hosting etc? Do you have any direct experience? All constructive input much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
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 -
Domain Alias SEO
We have 5 domain alias of our existing sites
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unibiz
All 5 domain alias are domain alias of our main site. It means, all domain alias will have exactly same site and contents
Like Main domain: www.mywebsite.com
DomainAlias: www.myproduct.com, www.myproduct2.com, www.myproduc3.com
And if anybody will open our site www.myproduct.com, it will open same website which I have in primary site what can i do to rank all website without any penalty....i s there any way? This is domain alias of in hosting industry Thanks0 -
Google is mixing subdomains. What can we do?
Hi! I'm experiencing something that's kind of strange for me. I have my main domain let's say: www.domain.com. Then I have my mobile version in a subdomain: mobile.domain.com and I also have a german version of the website de.domain.com. When I Google my domain I have the main result linking to: www.domain.com but then Google mixes all the domains in the sites links. For example a Sing in may be linking mobile.domain.com, a How it works link may be pointing to de.domain.com, etc What's the solution? I think this is hurting a lot my position cause google sees that all are the same domain when clearly is not. thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabrizzio0 -
SEO from Godaddy How Good is it?
http://www.godaddy.com/search-engine/seo-services.aspx?ci=44163 it said "Includes Standard Search Engine Visibility to Improve Search Rankings" it begs for question... Search Engine Visibility??? Improve SERP?!?!!? is it really that good? O.o; or have i successfully been eaten my promotional messages? Can anyone with experience with them share some information with me ? 🙂 (The price tag is mighty interesting)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IKT0