SEO – How Is My Site Indexed and Ranked by Search Engines?
Learn how Scroll Viewport optimizes your help center for the best possible ranking on search engines.
If, when and how your site is included in the search results of web search engines depends on a series of factors. Some of these factors are controlled by the search engines but some can be controlled by you as a user.
Is my Scroll Viewport site optimized for search engines (SEO)?
We don’t prevent search engines from finding, crawling and indexing your public Scroll Viewport site, unless you choose to restrict your site.
So that means each page of your publicly-available help center will be available for search engines to crawl. There is no option to prevent search engine indexing with Viewport.
Once crawled and indexed, SEO-wise Scroll Viewport help sites perform better than public Confluence pages. As static HTML sites, Scroll Viewport help sites are more focused on content than public Confluence pages, which load a lot of content-unrelated page elements.
We also take great care to deliver your help center in the most search engine optimized way possible (e.g. by generating a sitemap and meta descriptions for pages).
Using a sitemap and robots.txt to help search engines crawl your site
With each Viewport site, we automatically generate a sitemap.xml and robots.txt file with the names /sitemap.xml and /robots.txt in your domain's top level directory (e.g. example.scrollhelp.site/).
A sitemap is a XML file that lists the URLs for a site. A robots.txt tells search engines which URLs they should access and crawl on the site. In combination, they allow search engines to crawl the site more intelligently.
The robots.txt file generated by the app instructs search engines to access only those pages that are listed in your sitemap. Search engines will automatically look for these files in their location.
Please note that you cannot modify the robots.txt file currently.
Canonical link elements for all articles and global pages
Scroll Viewport automatically reports canonical URLs for all pages of your help center. This effectively improves search engine optimization (SEO) for your Scroll Viewport site, as duplicate content that is available from multiple URLs stops being an issue for search engines.
For example, you won't see /contentsource and /contentsource/index.html flagged as duplicates because /contentsource/index.html is now marked as the original source of the content.
Factors affecting site indexing
We can’t determine how long it takes for different search engines to index your site and all its content. How long indexing takes can be impacted by:
The specific search engine (and their crawling and indexing approach)
The theme and content choices you make for your Scroll Viewport site
The proactive SEO steps you decide to take in order to be indexed by a search engine
Use Google Search Console to appear in Google search results
You can take a series of proactive steps to control a search engines' ability to find and parse your content.
To be included in the Google index, you can use Google Search Console to submit an indexing request for your Scroll Viewport site. Google has extensive help resources on this topic.
Learn How To Verify A Viewport Site With The Google Search Console.