SEO & Search Indexing
BuildVu supports three view modes: idrviewer, content, and singlefile (since 2025.10). The idrviewer mode uses the IDRViewer which has not been designed or optimized for SEO. However, the content and singlefile modes produce raw HTML content that is indexable and can be used to 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. To generate each page individually without the IDRViewer, please set the view mode to
content. - Display all pages simultaneously so that crawlers see the whole document as a single page. BuildVu supports this using the
singlefileview mode (since 2025.10), which outputs all pages within a single file.
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.