How can SEO be improved for support centers?
Bold360 AI offers multiple designs for SEO-friendly support pages which include both free search capability and dynamic navigational FAQ hierarchy.
Google can crawl iframes on a website and is indexing the URLs of the iframe itself, not the parent URL. The same applies to the links inside the iframe. The iframe URL and the URL of the links within the iframe point to a subdomain. You can read more about the effect of using a sub-domain on your Google ranking here.
The challenge when setting up a support center is to avoid Google opening the iframe page instead of the support center page.
Bold360 AI solution
In the Bold360 AI solution for a support center, the iframe URL address is a CNAME provided by the customer, for example, support.acmeCorp.com. This iframe is hosted in a page that is defined by the customer as part of the site and will probably have a URL such as acmeCorp.com/support.
In the iframe, navigation links and articles are presented. These include a link to the support page, home page, label pages and article pages. All these links have the following structure: <CNAME URL>/Label1/Label2/Article-ID/Article-Title. For example, support.acmeCorp.com/General/How-to-Contact/12345/our-branches-opening-hours.html.
Search engine flow
The search engines crawl the hosting page and into the iframe. In the iframe, it crawls deeper and collects the information for all the articles and label pages. All of this content is part of the sub-domain assets. The score and links are, therefore, related to the subdomain.
When you want to find an article using Google, you search for the text that is in one of the articles. Google finds the article page and redirects to a page, which has the subdomain URL.
When the user selects an article, the subdomain URL opens. Bold360 AI redirects all these links to the parent page while maintaining the direct path to the relevant article. Eventually, the parent hosting page has a URL like acmeCorp.com/support?path=/General/How-to-Contact/12345/our-branches-opening-hours.html while the iframe inside maintains the URL received by Google support.acmeCorp.com/General/How-to-Contact/12345/our-branches-opening-hours.html.
How does the subdomain structure affect your SEO ranking compared to a subfolder structure?
In late October, 2012, Matt Cutts of Google's Webspam team clarified the subdomain/subdirectory situation as far as Google was concerned. He said "The historical reasons why you might have wanted to go for a subdomain don't really apply as much, and that leaves you with, okay both are on the same domain, overall, and so it's really a question of which one is easier for you." Therefore, your entire site benefits from the effects of search engine optimization.
How can I track subdomain analytics and include it with my main site analytics?
See the multidomain tracking guide for Google Analytics here.
