SEO & Search Indexing
The IDRViewer has not been designed or optimized for SEO, however the raw content produced by BuildVu is indexable and can be used in ways which optimize for SEO.
Why is the IDRViewer not good for SEO?
The IDRViewer utilizes on-demand loading of pages, meaning that pages are not loaded until the user navigates nearby to the page. This means that when a web-crawler loads the IDRViewer, it will only see the pages which are initially loaded (which would be approximately the first 15 pages).
It is also worth considering that the IDRViewer displays multiple pages simultaneously, meaning a crawler would see content from multiple pages when loading a specific page. This is not likely to cause duplicate content penalties, however it may confuse the crawler and lead to lower link strength.
How can the content be optimized for SEO?
The content produced by BuildVu contains real HTML text, which search engines can crawl and index.
To optimize SEO, you could either:
- Display one page at a time with a unique URL for each page so that each page is indexed individually. This is a technique that is common amongst websites that host user manuals online.
- Displayed all pages simultaneously so that crawlers see the whole document as a single page.
To generate each page individually without the IDRViewer, please set the view mode to content.
BuildVu does not currently have a setting which outputs all pages within a single file, but this is something we are currently exploring.
What about custom search solutions?
If you would like to use a third-party or custom search solution then we would recommend looking at the search.json functionality.