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Loading... By default your ProProfs sites cannot be crawled by the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo). However, you may want your site's pages to appear in the search results of the search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a collection of processes that focuses on getting a site indexed properly on search engines "organically" or through un-paid search results.
Before you get started, here are some best practices for making your site SEO friendly.
Once you have your content optimized and ready for search engines, follow these steps to get your site submitted to Google and Bing.
By default, SEO is disabled for a site which means the content is not crawlable. To enable SEO for a site follow these steps:
A description of each field:
Now that you have enabled SEO, search engines are no longer blocked from your site. However, you will need to select which pages you want to be crawled.
A sitemap is a file that tells Google and other search engines about available pages on your site. ProProfs will automatically generate the sitemap and include pages that are published and have SEO enabled. Draft, hidden, or deleted pages will be excluded from the sitemap.
ProProfs will automatically regenerate your sitemap each night. However, to manually regenerate your sitemap:
The next step is to submit your sitemap to Google and Bing.
Popular search engine providers give site owners several tools for managing how their pages should be crawled and indexed. This collection of tools is called Webmaster. You will use the Webmaster tools to submit your site to be index.
After your site has been submitted to Google and Bing, wait patiently. Unfortunately, it is up to Google and Bing how fast it takes for your pages to show up in the search results. Also, search engines do not guarantee that they will index all of your pages either.
A few helpful tests:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2326164/Index-Your-Content-Faster-With-the-Fetch-as-Google-Tool
Once your ProProfs site is indexed with Google you will want to know what people are searching for to find your pages and what pages are appearing in Google search results. You can connect Google Analytics to your ProProfs site and have access to such reports. The key reports include:
Here are some frequently asked questions:
I submitted my site to Google and Bing and it is still not showing up, what is wrong?
Crawling and indexing are processes which can take some time and which rely on many factors. In general, Google cannot make predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or indexed. It can take 1 week to 3 months to have a site crawled. Make sure you sign up for a Google Webmaster or Bing Webmaster Account and submit your sitemap. Also make sure your pages contain enough relevant content.
My site is indexed, but not showing up for keywords?
Once you have established that your site has been crawled and indexed, getting the search results you want is the next big step and something that takes time and consistent effort, even for the most experienced SEO experts.
Is Bing or Yahoo supported?
At this time only Google is fully supported. We are working with Bing (which powers Yahoo) now to get ProProfs indexable.
How can I see what pages Google has indexed?
To quickly determine whether your site is indexed, just perform a Google or Bing search for its entire URL. A search for site:ProProfs.com (no spaces), for instance returns the following results: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=site:ProProfs.com
Do I need to do anything with the robots.txt file?
A robots exclusion file tells search engines what they can and cannot crawl. You do not need to worry about this file as ProProfs will automatically manage it for your site once you enable SEO.
Why is the wrong title appearing in the search results?
The first line of any search result is the title of the web page. This text is generally taken from the contents of the
tag for that page (which is also the text that appears in the title bar of your browser). If the title tag is not meaningful, Google will pull the title from the page content or headings.
How do I keep my site out of Google and Bing?
By default all sites will have SEO disabled. Having SEO disabled means that Google and Bing will not be able to read your site. ProProfs uses a combination of Robots, meta, and AJAX to make a site completely blocked from the search engines.
If I make one site crawlable, will my other sites also be crawled?
If you enable SEO for one site, your other sites will not be crawled. You have to enable SEO for each site you want to be crawlable.
What if I have links to a page I don't want crawled?
ProProfs will automatically remove the links to pages that are not set to be crawlable so the search engine cannot follow them.
How do I remove a page from Google?
You can use the Webmaster tools. Follow this for Google support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en
Why am I getting an error about Sitemap containing urls which are blocked by robots.txt?
Google most likely still has the cached version of your robots.txt. It may take 24 hours to update.
In ProProfs a site for each language is created and managed independently. For example, if you have a product called ABC Widget and need documentation in English and Spanish, you would need to create two sites in ProProfs (one in English and one in Spanish). Then you can link these sites together with a language drop down. Then domain url is also shared such as: site.helpdocsonline.com - for English and site.helpdocsonline.com/es/ for Spanish site.
Since each language is managed as a separate site in ProProfs you will need to submit each site separately in the Webmaster tools. For example, you would add a site "site.helpdocsonline.com" and then add another site for each language you have such as "site.helpdocsonline.com/es/ "