Robohelp App>Website>Search Engine?

[Lanshark]

I am considering using RoboHelp for a couple of specialized websites, but I would want them to be successfully indexed by the search engine spiders. Has anybody tried this yet, and, if so, what were the results?

I am wondering, too, if a spider would see the RH ToC as a site map...

~ JM ~

[Peter Grainge]

I used to use RH for my site and the search engines did pick it up. They will only show the conventional path, that is without the startpage.htm# in it. As a result the topics will not have the TOC opened by default. The TOC will not be seen as a site map but is that important these days?

Rick Stone's http://www.robowizard.com site is RoboHelp based. Google for some of his topics.

[Lanshark]

Thanks, Peter; I haven't looked at Rick's site in a while, and his RH format just slipped my mind.

IS your www.grainge.org site the one to which you referred as previously being done with RH? If so, what prompted the change?

[Peter Grainge]

Nothing to do with RoboHelp's ability to produce the site. I changed when Macromedia were running the show, or not depending on your point of view. There were some tales IE7 would break webhelp and with RH looking as if it was on life support at that time, I had to take a view. Changing the site would not be a five minute job. If I converted to Flare, the RH stuff would not work for those who would still want it plus I was not convinced about Flare at that stage (it was still in beta).

Overall I decided the best thing would be to go for Dreamweaver as any HTML editor could take over from that if needs be and it could launch either RH or Flare demos. Thus I could keep my old stuff and add Flare stuff if I did go that route, which I didn't as Adobe came to the rescue.