Story Map Google Search Results

[JasonGraf]

I have used the cascading story map to create a new website for map surveying and engineering company.  I added a mapping component to show our two office locations.

Our google search results have disappeared.  It's as if the content of the story map is not being crawled by google robots at all.

Is there anyway to correct this?

Thanks,

Jay

[SteveCole]

I don't really think that the Storymap is responsible for this but I'd suggest building a new sitemap and submitting it to Google.

[JasonGraf]

It's just that the index.html is the only page on my web host.  It simply points to the AGOL item ID that contains all of the actual content.

I ran a web tool to create a sitemap for me and it came back almost blank because the index page has no content on it.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<!-- created with Free Online Sitemap Generator www.xml-sitemaps.com -->

<url>
<loc>http://www.gayrondebruin.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2018-01-30T17:16:14+00:00</lastmod>
</url>

</urlset>

[RupertEssinger]

Hi. Sorry about the issue. If I search for Gayron de Bruin it does return your self-hosted Cascade for me http://www.gayrondebruin.com/  but not in the top most spot. 

There's one other example of a Cascade being used as the website for an organization that I know of, http://themaritimealliance.org/  , but in that case it's a redirect to a Cascade hosted in ArcGIS Online rather than being the URL of a self-hosted Cascade, and I notice that their home page doesn't appear in search results at all when I search for The Maritime Alliance, except via the Google search card for them as a place on Google Maps.

I don't know enough about how this works to be much help though.

Rupert

[JasonGraf]

Is there a way to download the entire application to host myself?

[RupertEssinger]

Your self-hosted Cascade does have all the application code, and it's the index.html file that contains the tags that social and search are reading. There's not a way to download all the application content to host yourself but you don't need to do that (unless you are a large enterprise that wants to host all their maps and apps in their own cloud behind their firewall, in which case you'd use ArcGIS Enterprise instead of ArcGIS Online).

Rupert

[JasonGraf]

What I'm reading about search engine optimization is that content is king.  The tags don't matter when the index.html page has no text to describe my site.  That's all buried in the AGOL item, so google can't rank me where I need to be.

Thanks for your help, but at this point I feel like I need to find an alternate to the story map for my site.

Jason

[SteveCole]

How about embedding your story map using an iframe? See this ESRI blog post (and maybe utilize tip #1 to make it fit more seemlessly into your site design).

[LucyButler]

Hi Jason

I have a similar issue with a cascade story map I am self-hosting on its own domain name, that is not being indexed by Google. From a google search its looks as if you resolved your issue as your site is now appearing top of the search. How did you resolve the issue?

Any advice appreciated.

Many thanks 

Lucy

[JasonGraf]

We haven’t done anything to solve this issue.

When you google our company name, we are now the first result, but I think that just took time for the google robots to do their thing. The title displays “Story Map Cascade”, so there is much to be improved upon.

If you search Long Island Land Surveying, we don’t show up. We used to be number one.

I plan on hiring a firm to recreate the website on our webserver to help rectify this issue.

Jason R. Graf, LS

Vice President

<http://www.gayrondebruin.com/>