Can MadCap Flare WebHelp be made SEO Friendly?

[AnthonyYoung]

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.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

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.

[justin-brock]

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

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[justin-brock]

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.