Can the search engine spiders crawl RoboHelp pages?

[LyzaLatham]

I had always thought that the search engines were unable to crawl and index RoboHelp content for SEO purposes.  But several of the pages on my client's site www.numbercruncher.com are showing up in search results on Google.  Can anyone help me to understand what the constraints are for this? Or send me somewhere I can get the details?  I've been searching everywhere and not sure where else to look.

[johndaigle]

As long as the WebHelp is on the public internet it is subject to search indexing. I gather you do not want the site to be searchable.

I haven't done this in a long time, but did find this link which may get you started on blocking search engines.

http://www.webmasters-central.com/article-blog/search-engine-marketing/stop-search-engine-robots-ind...

John Daigle

Adobe Certified RoboHelp and Captivate Instructor

www.showmethedemo.com

[LyzaLatham]

Actually, we DO want them to be searchable, but thought we had to extract all the content and create PDFs or separate HTML pages so it would be indexed.

So maybe what I need to recommend to the client is that the pages need to appear on their Site Map so the SEs can find them all?

[Captiv8r · Accepted solution]

Hi Lyza

Hopefully John won't mind my offering some tidbits here that may help illustrate the issue.

Perhaps a small experiment will help here.

Open Google and search for the phrase: Build tags on the brew and note the top link you see. It should read February 2004.

Click that link and note what you see.

Now click the following link: Click here to view

Look familiar?

What you should be seeing is a page inside a WebHelp system. Nothing special whatsoever was done to make this happen. In other words, the Search Engines were able to index this page simply because it is available to the web. No SiteMap was created. Nothing special was done.

Some folks are working under the assumption that because WebHelp and FlashHelp are presented using extensive Framesets, that content cannot be found. This may have been true years ago, but advances in the indexing methods overcame that issue long ago.

Now Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a whole different animal and there are entire companies and many consultants that profess to assist with SEO and increasing your rankings.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links RoboHelp Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Begin learning RoboHelp HTML 7 or 8 within the day - $24.95! Adobe Certified RoboHelp HTML Training SorcerStone Blog RoboHelp eBooks

[Chrodgers]

Hi All,

I'm a newbie when it comes to SEO, so excuse me if this is a very basic question... My webhelp is accessible via the internet (via http and https), but when I do a google search for a specific term that I know exists in the help, my help isn't returned in any of the results. Any ideas why?

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

SEO is a science in and of itself. There are many factors and a great many folks that specialize in tuning SEO to get the biggest bang.

However, it strikes me that you are expecting the Google search engine to perhaps return you some specific terms in your help. The thing is, while the terms may seem to be somewhat specific in your help system, they also may appear in the myriad other HTML pages Google and other search systems index. So your pages are likely listed somewhere among the mix, but you are competing with the thousands of other pages out there. So you may need to click the 10th or 20th "o" in the Google string to finally see YOUR page.

Another thing to consider is how long the pages have been available to the web. If it's fairly new, they probably won't be found as quickly as it might if they have been around for eons.

Cheers... Rick

Helpful and Handy Links Begin learning Captivate 5 moments from now! $29.95 Captivate Wish Form/Bug Reporting Form Adobe Certified Captivate Training SorcererStone Blog Captivate eBooks

[Matt316684253ddd]

I have RoboHelp content that I would like searchable by google, but it is not.

If I go to google and restrict the search to my site via "site:www.mysite.com keyword1 keyword2", I don't get the results I expect. By refining the search (akin to what a google custom search does) this isn't a ranking issue.

What are the best practices to getting a RoboHelp content searchable (i.e. submitted to google for crawling/indexing)?  I've put the the URL into my site map plus added several pages to to googles URL inspection tool, and made sure the content is not being blocked by robots.txt.

<<

Some folks are working under the assumption that because WebHelp and FlashHelp are presented using extensive Framesets, that content cannot be found. This may have been true years ago, but advances in the indexing methods overcame that issue long ago.

>>

If above still has "something" to do with google not being able to search RoboHelp content, please give any suggestions to help overcome.

[Amebr]

This thread is 13 years old and even then the frameset issue wasn't an issue any more. (And even if it were, neither Webhelp nor Flashhelp are valid outputs in RH2019 New UI or above (which I'm assuming you're using).)

There is nothing built in to RH that will prevent the output being crawled, as far as I'm aware, so I think you'll need to talk to your server administrator to make sure your server is publically available and isn't blocking search engine bots. Other than that, it can take some time for a site to be crawled so you might just need to wait some time. Or maybe find out if you can submit the site to the search engine - you'd need to go to a relevant forum or search engine documentation site for that information.