Comments on: Search Engine Optimizing Your Help Content for Google [Organizing Content 11]

By: Shanae Wehmeier

Shanae Wehmeier — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 22:35:28 +0000

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Nice content on your blog, very concise straight to the point. The value of a link for the receiving page is determined in part by the topic of the page the link is on.

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Weekly links roundup by Communications from DMN — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:32:40 +0000

[...] Johnson on organizing Web-facing help for [...]

By: Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:26:22 +0000

The whole idea of PageRank is self-perpetuating. As you say, many great sites out there never get read. It’s like the idea that a waterfall starts from one droplet of water. It takes a while for a site to get the necessary PageRank to be read. It takes one person linking to that site, which eventually leads to a cascade of other people linking to it, which eventually builds the site’s PageRank to a considerable size. At that point, the site’s visibility continues to increase. Because of the site’s PageRank, the site is more visible. Because it’s more visible, more people link to it and its PageRank increases. And so on.

By: Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:22:41 +0000

Good point, Shawn. The whole content is principle does seem to encompass linking as well, rather than being subordinate to it.

By: Tom Johnson

Tom Johnson — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:09:14 +0000

Tony, thanks for adding your insight about frames. I didn’t know about the redirect method. Is this so that Google can index the entire frameset? I’m not sure what that URL would be, or how that exactly would be implemented, but that’s okay because I mostly concluded that HATs aren’t the best tool for web visibility anyway.

By: Eddie VanArsdall

Eddie VanArsdall — Sun, 30 May 2010 16:13:29 +0000

Tom, thanks for the mention of my post. I appreciate your sharing the results of your testing. I have actually been working more diligently at trying to improve search results.

Although Flare’s WebHelp is available online at http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare6/, I’ve always felt that I should include links to specific related help topics in my posts because, as you point out, they’re hard to find.

Eddie

By: Tony Chung

Tony Chung — Sun, 30 May 2010 00:46:36 +0000

Great job, Tom. About your thought that frames are lousy for SEO, they are, but only because of the way they’re implemented. Frame-based help would work great if the URL for the topic content frame is redirected to a URL that the help system could use to rebuild the entire frameset.

This doesn’t, however, solve the problem of people linking directly to the help content. For the most part, the location bar only displays the URL of the master frame and not the topic within it.

Greater minds than ours will have to work out this solution.

I doubt you’ll see this while you’re camping. Hope you had a good trip!

By: Shawn Dowler

Shawn Dowler — Sat, 29 May 2010 07:58:06 +0000

@Ivan:

Content is king because people link to good content. Google looks at content, but relies heavily on people linking to good content to know whether it is good or not. Google is likely to link to blogs where people link to the help file or at least talk about the solution. From an advertising perspective, that should be just fine to have Google link to a blog that talks about the product. From a user help perspective, the user is still getting the answer to the question, even if it’s from a blog post written by someone who read the help doc that Google isn’t linking to directly.

It’s all circular in the end.