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About search engine optimization (SEO) in Help Center

Deepa Daniels
  • Edited

all plans

Help Center comes with its own search that you can optimize your content for, but it’s important to think about other search tools your customers might use to get to your content. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can play a part in helping your customers to help themselves, by ensuring search engines, such as Google, are able to easily make sense of your content. SEO can help you position your Help Center content properly within search results.

Search engines frequently tweak their algorithms, which makes SEO a moving target, but don’t sweat it. By creating a Help Center, your content will always be taking advantage of the latest SEO best practices.

Read on to find out how Help Center is optimized for search engines, and also find out what you can do to build your Help Center in a way that will benefit your users and increase your search rank on Google and other popular search engines.

This article covers the following topics:

How Help Center is designed to help with SEO

You could think of SEO as three pillars: content, links and structure. Help Center is designed to make each pillar strong, so that your SEO results will be strong.

This section covers the following topics:

How Help Center helps with SEO pillar 1: Content

Content is mostly defined as written copy, but it also includes images, videos, attachments, and so on. You have control of your Help Center content, and it’s important to think about how your content is used and updated, the quality of the content, and where the content is placed.

Meta description tags

Help Center knowledge base (KB) articles and community posts include automatic meta description tags, using the first 140 characters of your article or post. KB categories and sections, and community topics in the Help Center, use the description you include as a summary of what the category, section, or topic is about.

Meta descriptions provide a concise explanation of the contents of web pages. They are commonly used on search engine results pages to display preview snippets for a page.

How Help Center helps with SEO pillar 2: Links

Links include both internal and external linking. Think of it as pointing to another person and noting your opinion of them. The more people (aka domains) reference another page with their opinion, the more search engines trust what that page is about.

Help Center has a clear and simple URL structure that leads to better crawling of your content by search engines like Google. Help Center URLs contain both an ID and a slug, as follows:

https://[domain]/hc/en-us/articles/[id]-[slug]

This means they are readable by humans and search engines, but don't break when you change the title of the article. For example:

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203691506-Lesson-5-Business-Rules

And navigation is easy, with breadcrumbs and a natural flow that ensures all levels of the Help Center are available to crawlers, even without a site map.

How Help Center helps with SEO pillar 3: Structure

Structure includes technical areas of crawling, indexing, and site architecture.

This section covers the following topics:

Duplicate content

Duplicate content can confuse search engines as to which page to rank over another, sometimes leading to lowered rankings when the search engine chooses the wrong page. Aside from your having a good site architecture and avoiding the creation of duplicate content, Help Center helps keep duplicate content at a minimum by using canonical URL tags.

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices. A canonical URL tag is a page level meta tag that is placed in the HTML header of a web page. It tells search engines which URL is the canonical version of the page being displayed. Its purpose is to keep duplicate content out of the search engine index, while consolidating your page’s strength into one ‘canonical’ page. See Use canonical URLs from Google to learn more.

Alternate hreflang

Help Center has hreflang tags on the home page, section pages, category pages, and article pages so that crawlers are not confused by our language selector. The hreflang tag (also referred to as rel="alternate" hreflang="x") tells search engines which language you are using on a specific page, so it can serve the most relevant result to users searching in their language.

For example, if you have created German versions of your English Help Center articles, the German versions are tagged hreflang=“de” so that searches with an IP address from Germany will see a German page. See Use hreflangfor language and regional URLs from Google to learn more.

Temporary redirects

Help Center keeps 302s to a minimum. 302 is an HTTP status code for moved temporarily, and it automatically forwards the requester to a different location. If both the page the requester is being redirected from and the page they are being redirected to are indexed by Google, then you get a duplicate page indexed.

Speed and website performance can have an impact on search rank. There is regular performance work on Help Center to optimize page and element loading time by using caching, removing redundancies, and optimizing code.

HTTPS everywhere

In August 2014 Google announced that it would be using HTTPS as a search ranking signal. Help Center uses HTTPS everywhere, so you get secure and encrypted connections.

Mobile friendly

In April 2015 Google announced that it would being using mobile friendliness as a search ranking signal. This ensures that users get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for mobile devices. By using Help Center, your content is mobile friendly by using the accompanying mobile site or by creating a custom responsive theme.

Automatic XML sitemap (Guide Professional)

The standard Help Center structure, with clearly marked breadcrumbs, makes it easy for search engines to correctly index your pages, and with the XML sitemap, search engines have visibility into all your pages, regardless of your Help Center structure.

The XML sitemap helps search engines like Google find pages in your Help Center knowledge base. This ensures that users can find your categories, sections, and articles when searching, but it does not improve individual ranking of these pages. The sitemap does not include community content.

The sitemap is automatically enabled and is updated every two hours with new content, ensuring that search engines have the latest content. The sitemap is accessible to search engine crawlers via the robots.txt file on your Help Center. If your Help Center requires sign in, the sitemap will not be automatically generated. Web crawlers cannot access closed or restricted Help Centers. 

You can view the XML sitemap for your Help Center at: subdomain.zendesk.com/hc/sitemap.xml

Note: The automatic XML sitemap is available on Guide Professional. On Guide Lite, you can create and submit your own Help Center site map to Google for indexing (see our support tip, Creating a site map for your Help Center).

How you can optimize your Help Center for search

It's important to keep in mind the basics of how the Help Center search works and also how popular search engines work so that you can optimize your Help Center and its content for search. You have a number of options for improving search results so that users find answers to their questions.

Best practices for optimizing search

  • Create original, high quality content. Your site’s content should be unique, specific, and high quality. If it is, users are more likely to stay on the page and link to it or your Help Center, thus improving your Google ranking.

    Give your articles brief titles that accurately describe the page content. Don’t post any content that has been mass-produced or outsourced from other sites. Your content should be created primarily to give visitors a good user experience. When linking to other articles, ensure that you convey the content that you are linking to. If you are not using a standard Help Center theme, ensure your links are easy to see.

  • Provide a great user experience. Ensure that your Help Center looks good and is easy to navigate.

  • Include synonyms and keywords discreetly in the title or body of your article. You can also add them as labels to the article. Article titles have the most weight, labels a bit less, and the body the least.

  • Avoid keyword stuffing. This can actually harm your Google ranking. Google recommends that you focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context. See Keyword stuffing from Google.

  • Create multiple word labels with white spaces. Underscores and spaces are not interchangeable in Help Center search. Since most users do not search with underscores, it is best to include both types of labels.

  • Choose a title that concisely describes the content of your article. The title is the most prominent piece of information in the search results. It's often what people use to decide whether to click the link or move on.

  • Promote your content. Highlight useful, high-quality items that increase your site's reputation and Google ranking.

    For example, make an announcement on the Help Center home page when you add something new and important. Avoid promoting every little update or addition though. It increases noise and the likelihood that people will turn off your announcements or your Twitter feed or your other channels.

  • Look at the numbers. Use Google Analytics with your Help Center to gather and analyze information about your visitors and your content. For example, you can determine your bounce rate, and measure the effect of your search optimizations, among other things. See Enabling Google Analytics for your Help Center..

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38 Comments

  • Ujjaval Parikh

    Hi Deepa, 

    I want to add my own meta description and title of the article instead of using automated version, can i do it?

    5
  • Caroline

    Is there a solution to updating meta title & description for the homepage of the Guide yet? This is very important so I'm hoping there's a way to do it by now...

    4
  • Yeny Rubiano

    Hello,

    Any updates about adding meta descriptions for each article? Is this a feature in queue?

    Thanks!

    4
  • Brian Müller

    Hi Deepa,

    What is the status of letting us change the Meta Title of our Support Center pages? I know the h1 sets the meta title currently but that isn't a sufficient enough solution for articles that have long titles. Having the ability to edit the meta title and meta description would be fantastic!

    Thanks,

    Brian

    4
  • Matthieu VALEZY

    Hello Deepa, thank you for this article.

    It would be helpful to allow customization of the Homepage Meta description.

    Thanks in advance.

    Matthieu

    4
  • Proventeq Support

    ^ Agreed. Its really poor that there is no ability to customise meta descriptions. Unless you have a good introduction on your page, then the meta description that's picked up is no different to what Google would scrape were it to come to the website. Also there is no meta description whatsover for the guide homepage. I, like a lot of other people i'm sure, don't have any text on the guide homepage because its kept neat with a hero image, and some categories displayed. At the very least this should be manageable.

    This thread is two years old now, with no movement on it. People are obviously crying out for it, so why not give them the ability. Its great youve added the sitemap.xml ability, but more and more people consider their support portal to be as important as their website for SEO, so should allow for control of these basic SEO elements. 

    3
  • BrianTobin

    Thanks, Deepa! This is very helpful. Our SEO consultants suggested we specify a Schema.org structure (such as "tech article" http://schema.org/TechArticle ) for our help center and add schema code to paragraphs and elements inside our article. This increases Google's ranking and also allows Google to show appropriate snippets inside search results like this:
    https://www.evernote.com/l/AAEsP-x2Bo9IbaWjnZRK79RNgzl6JY4B_FsB/image.png

    Is there a way for Zendesk Help Center to either globally pick one schema to use (so those of us who care can use it) or for us to specify a schema ourselves? It seems like http://schema.org/TechArticle would be most appropriate.

    1
  • Cole, David

    Has anyone tried to add their Zendesk instance to Baidu?

    We have a Chinese version of Zendesk that is not being indexed at all, I've tried registering it through the Baidu webmaster tools but this only allows for the top level domain to be registered https://xxx.zendesk.com and not https://xxx.zendesk.com/hc/zh-cn it does say that sub folders can be added later without verification. The only verification options we have a a code snippet in the header, add a file or via CName.

    I'm at a loss as to how I can proceed

     

    1
  • Mickey Rausch

    Hi Deepa, 

    I am finding that my individual Help Center articles are being found in Google's search engines when the title is searched, but not the Help Center itself. How can I add something to the Help Center so that when a user searches for say "Narratives for Qlik Help" or "Narratives for Qlik Support" they are directed to our Help Center in Google's search results:

    https://qlik-support.narrativescience.com/hc/en-us

     

    1
  • Hal Rosner

    has Zendesk developed/implemented (or plans to develop/implement) support for bi-directional word stemming (for example, search for cancelling and return an article with cancel) and/or synonyms table (for example, enter the words edit, modify, change and return an article that contains either word regardless of which word is entered as the search term)

    1
  • Brody Dorland

    I was just informed by our SEO provider that all internal links on our ZD Help Center are coded as "no follow", so we're significantly limiting the benefits that these internal links could provide. Is there a setting or any chance that this could be changed so that internal links are "follow"? 

    I realize that the follow/no-follow tactic was important a few years back, but times have changed and we'd love to be able to determine whether or not links should be followed. 

    Thanks in advance for any info you can provide!

    1
  • Benjamin Koehler

    Hi Cyrup, I'm glad you're looking looking into optimizing your help center!

    I'm not familiar with this preference based on H1 text, but I can say that the help center pages and article designs in your Guide are specifically designed to be clean and search engine-friendly.

    We also offer some additional optimizing steps here: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206401358-About-search-engine-optimization-SEO-in-Help-Center

    Ben Koehler
    Customer Advocate
    bkoehler@zendesk.com

    1
  • Alexander Popa
    Zendesk team member

    Thank you Kelly! As the meta tags can not be amended, we would recommend you to submit the links via the Remove URL feature.

    Alex | Tier 2 - Senior Technical Support Engineer | support@zendesk.com
    Love Your Zendesk - The Fastest Way to Great Customer Support

    0
  • Cyrup

    Hi all, thanks for the article. 

    I've recently learned that browsers rank web pages lower if there are multiple uses of Heading 1 text. Does Zendesk's in-built article Titles count as Heading 1? i.e, if I use another Heading 1, is that going to make the site rank lower?

    0
  • Deepa Daniels

    Hi Andrej,

    We don't have any hard-set numbers or test done on this. But it is probably a good idea to host map to your domain rather than ours. It is generally considered an SEO best practice to try and keep one’s content located within the same domain.

    Kr,
    Deepa

    0
  • Benjamin Olney

    I'm curious about duplicate content SEO. Long story short; I have an FAQ page on my website, but I use a bot that helps assist with my online chat. The bot provides answers to common customer questions but it currently can't read the FAQ's on my website, it only has the ability to read and process the FAQ's from Zendesk. So I have had to copy and paste my FAQ's into a new Help Center on Zendesk. 

    How will this appear to Google considering that I link back to my website in some of the articles? Is it seen as plagiarism? Will the ranking of my website be affected? 

    0
  • Mary Paez

    where in the code do you add the meta data description for the home page (help center)?

     

    0
  • Deepa Daniels

    Hi Brian,
    Glad you found the article helpful. Thanks for the question.

    Help Center doesn't support schema.org schemas as a feature. However you can inject schema.org attributes into templates manually with Curlybars.

    https://developer.zendesk.com/apps/docs/help-center-templates/introduction

    You are welcome to post this as a feature request in the Product Feedback Forum https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/200132066-Product-feedback

    Example:

        <h1>{{article.title}}</h1>

    <div itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person" class="article-avatar">
      <img src="{{article.author.avatar_url}}" alt="Avatar">
    </div>
    <div itemprop="name" class="article-author">{{article.author.name}}</div>
    0
  • Andrej Telle

    Hey Deepa,

    I was wondering how much the SEO effort is weakened by using the zendesk.com domain for our help center. Do you have any tests on the difference between running the help center under the zendesk domain vs host mapping it to our domain?
    Thanks,
    Andrej

    0
  • bryanus
    • Edited

    I just migrated to HC, but my imported articles have all lost their original publish date. Now, they all say "updated 1 Day ago".

    Additionally, the SEO-friendly URL format of my Web Portal articles (e.g.http://xxx.zendesk.com/entries/80470579-Create-a-Homepage-Slideshow) have now been altered to a non-SEO-friendly format:

    https://xxx.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/211264823

    And according to this document, I don't think this shouldn't have happened.

    (update) Just noticed something. Once I am IN the HelpCenter by following the original Web Portal article link, if I click the sidebar link for the same article (Copenhagen them has a listing of articles in the same section), it loads this URL:

    https://xxx.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/80470579-Create-a-Homepage-Slideshow

    (notice the added SEO-friendly slug?)

    It seems that the redirected links from the Web Portal are losing the slug at the end. This should be a rather simple fix from a programmatic point of view. Your team will just need to add the slug to their redirect/routing URL constructor for Web Portal links. ;-)

     

    0
  • Deepa Daniels

    Hi Brody,

    Thanks for your question. There is no setting for follow/no-follow. 

    How are you defining internal links, and what problem are you trying to solve with this

    For internal content with access restrictions on Help Center it wouldn't matter what the links do since Google or other search engines can’t see them anyway. 

    0
  • Alexander Popa
    Zendesk team member

    Hi Kelly!

    To address this workflow, we would recommend you to submit these link via the Remove URL feature available via the Google Webmasters Tool console.

    Google Webmasters Tool would allow you to remove pages from being displayed in Google's SERPs by submitting the URLs of those pages via the Remove URL feature.

    Please note that it might take some time for the request to be addressed from Google's side.

    I hope this helps!

    Alex | Tier 2 - Senior Technical Support Engineer | support@zendesk.com
    Love Your Zendesk - The Fastest Way to Great Customer Support

    0
  • Brody Dorland

    Definition of internal links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_link

    Our Help Center is public and uses our domain (help.ourdomain.com), so search engines will naturally include and evaluate all Help Center content and links as part of our domain authority and rank accordingly.

    Internal links have value in SE algorithms. If all internal links on the Help Center are no-follow, then we get no credit. We probably have a few hundred internal links embedded throughout our Help Center articles. 

    I'd strongly encourage you all to consider this as a setting for Help Center that can be adjusted at the account level. 

    0
  • Nicole S.
    Zendesk Community Team

    @Hal - We have not heard of any plans along those lines to date. You may want to share your thoughts in this thread in the Product Feedback topic, which the Product Managers read and respond to, and where other users can see and vote on your ideas. I also expect an update from therm there in the near future. 

    @Joshua - the /hc/xx-xx/ format can't be removed from the url. Sorry about that one. 

     

    0
  • Proventeq Support

    Hi, as a fellow zendesk user, I can probably answer this one. We have zendesk and our support portal. When building it we had everything behind a login, including the knowledge base. When it was ready I changed the access.

    If you require people to login to access your articles, then google spiders etc will need to too, so that won't appear as a listing. For your KB to appear, you need to set it as we have, with free access to the guide, and login access to the support area - which I setup on a per user basis.

    Ours is here, if you'd like an example - we provide data migration services to clients, allowing them to migrate legacy systems such as Meridio, Hummingbird and Documentum to SharePoint and Oracle.

    https://support.proventeq.com

    0
  • Biplab Mahanta

    Hi,

    Google prefer short links to rank high. Besides the Contents, optimized pictures, <a href="https://twistarticle.com/the-importance-of-clear-and-crawl-friendly-urls-to-your-seo-efforts/">Crawl Friendly URL</a>s are also very important for search engine optimization. Thanks for your post.

    0
  • Alex Zlatkus

    Thanks for your feedback here! Makes sense!

    0
  • Damien Passmore

    Hi Zendeskers,

    We've noticed that Google is truncating the first-140-characters-as-meta-description down to 130 characters instead.

    Is this a new algorithmic change at Google's end that we all need to be aware of? We don't massively like the idea of re-writing everything to accomodate a shorter MD...

    Thx

     

    0
  • Vladan Jovic
    • Edited
    Community Moderator

    I didn't tested it but it should work with jquery:

        $('meta[name=description]').attr('content', 'here goes new meta desc.....');
    0
  • Nicole S.
    Zendesk Community Team

    @Benjamin - I don't think this will affect your SEO in any significant way, since it's a single piece of content. I am pretty sure it doesn't qualify as plagiarism when you're the owner of both pieces of content. 

    @Holly - That sounds like it would involve some anchor linking. It's not part of the current functionality, though if you'd like to suggest that for a future iteration, you should head over to the Product Feedback forum. 

    @Amanda - To clarify, what are you wanting to redirect from and to? Do you want to set it up so that if a user goes to your old url they get redirected to your new Help Center URL, or are you wanting to redirect from the Zendesk url to something else?

    0

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