Custom URL with Enterprise License?

Lvivcenter

It has become critical for us to publish our storymaps with a custom URL referring to our institution. In the current state, Google returns links to storymaps.arcgis.com as the first search result and doesn't show our institutional pages at all, where these stories are embedded. Basically, stories we create with Storymaps are disconnected from our institutional website - people don't see them as a part of our project, because they only see 'storymaps.arcgis.com' in google search results. 

An ideal solution would be to hide 'storymaps.arcgis.com' from google indexing so that only our institutional URL become visible. As far as I understand, it is simply against the model that ArcGIS has chosen and will never happen. 

Could the Enterprise license be a solution to at least get a custom URL to improve our institutional visibility in the Google results for the stories that we publish using Storymaps? 

oevans_storymaps

@Lvivcenter - Thanks for sharing this feedback. We have heard this from a number of customers and have been working on a way to address this concern.

Later this month, we'll be adding a capability to ArcGIS StoryMaps that will enable you to choose whether or not your published content appears in web search results. This will be a simple checkbox that you'll see when publishing a story or collection.

This option will be enabled by default; but if you uncheck this option your item will not appear in web search results. I believe this will address your request to be able to suppress the storymaps.arcgis.com URLs of your content items in web search results. 

While this setting will resolve part of your challenge, you may still have some work to do to ensure Google and other search engines see and promote your organization's URLs in search results. Our storymaps.arcgis.com URLs get ranked very high because we do a lot of work to follow SEO best practices and get high scores for accessibility and performance. You or your organization's web team will want to make sure you are doing this for your own web pages so your pages achieve high rankings.

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> Could the Enterprise license be a solution to at least get a custom URL to improve our institutional visibility in the Google results for the stories that we publish using Storymaps? 

Yes, this is also an option to customize your URLs. However, when using ArcGIS Enterprise you must also understand that you'll be taking on more administrative work managing your Enterprise deployment. You will also not get the latest features of ArcGIS StoryMaps on the same timeline as you would when using the Online version.