We are hoping for assistance regarding SEO and indexing individual pages of our applications on Google search. One of our applications has a CMS like section that should be searchable through Google and other search engines. To make them crawlable by Google we have taken the following steps: Implemented SEO_Sitemaps Module: We imported the SEO_Sitemaps module and made necessary modifications to the robots.txt and sitemap.xml files. Google successfully indexed all pages listed on the sitemap. On-Page JavaScript for Dynamic Content: Utilizing JavaScript, we've implemented functionality to dynamically change titles, descriptions, and meta tags. Manual crawls by Google reflect these updates accurately. Initially, we were thrilled to see approximately five pages correctly indexed by Google, displaying the correct links, titles, and descriptions, after manually inspecting the url and requesting indexation. However, our excitement was short-lived as Google later deemed all pages as duplicates, reverting back to indexing only the homepage (index.html). So individual URL inspections work, when the crawler comes by, it fails. Despite our best efforts, including experimenting with various strategies such as delaying crawling until JavaScript changes are applied, adjusting the robots.txt file to exclude index.html, we haven't been able to convince Google to recognize each page as unique. At this moment, thanks to Mx 10, we even tried to redirect the bots to a plain content pages as to create a greater difference between pages (not sharing menus, footers etc.). While we see that the google bot is indeed redirected, the result in Google search Console is unchanged. We understand that the content of all pages in Mendix is always loaded into the index.html, therefore they are not wrong in their assessment. However, we noticed that the Mendix community you are on right now, which is also built using Mendix, successfully appears in Google search results. Who knows how the Mendix community/forum is structured and what steps we can take to replicate its success for our application. Every thought that could steer us towards a solution is appreciated!
asked
Mark Tangeman
2 answers
0
Hello Casper,
Your answer steered us in the right direction, but it was an implementation for a very old Mendix version. After quite a lot of tinkering and some help from a high-code colleague, we managed to set it up.
The issue is that redirects past the `#` will not be followed by Google and others. `https://www.url.com/p/12345` will be redirected to `https://www.url.com/#/12345` by Mendix and then back to `https://www.url.com/p/12345`. Live URL inspections in the Google search console seem to work, but the real bot does not accept it. The solution is to intercept bot calls and return a static HTML page while users are redirected to a page within the Mendix app.
We also tried to get help from Mendix (they do the same 'trick' for the community, for instance), but unfortunately did not receive any help. A bit disappointing.
Since there must be many others struggling with this issue, we created a module that provides everything needed for a successful implementation (content of the SEO_Sitemap module by Mendix + additional configurable request handler for search engines). It is under review for the marketplace at the moment, and I will share a link when it is live.
Kind regards,
Mark
answered
Mark Tangeman
0
And there it is. Enjoy and feel free to provide feedback: