Is there any way to control/influence how search engines discover a hub site?

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03-06-2020 02:24 AM
ColinCampbell
Occasional Contributor

Hi,

 

I was wondering how a Hub page is discovered by search engines and if there's any way to influence which pages a SE brings back as matches? 

For our hub - one for surveying Willow Tits - if I put in ‘Willow Tit Hub’ into Google the second match (and the only one relevant to our hub) is the following:

 

https://national-willow-tit-survey-rspb.hub.arcgis.com/datasets/about-this-site

 

Whilst it’s great to be getting a hit on the hub (for a while I didn’t get anything relevant coming back) the page given isn’t really part of the hub (in fact I'd never seen it before).  It looks to be related to one of the hub’s real pages:

 

https://national-willow-tit-survey-rspb.hub.arcgis.com/pages/about-this-site

 

But has ‘datasets’ rather than ‘pages’ in the url and so gives a more metadata-type view than the page.  I think this would be fairly confusing to someone looking for the hub, even though you can get to the actual content by clicking at the top menu bar.  What would be much better would be if it gave an actual page on the hub – and ideally the main/home page.

Is there anything I can do to address this?  It's fairly important that people can find hubs this way.

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