Has anyone else experienced technical SEO issues with the help center and articles when running a Site Audit on SEMrush or other platform? | Community
Skip to main content
Answered

Has anyone else experienced technical SEO issues with the help center and articles when running a Site Audit on SEMrush or other platform?

  • Oct 21, 2020 8:44 PM UTC
  • 11 replies
  • 1256 views

I am getting quite a few Errors and Warnings on my Technical SEO site audit in regards to the help center articles I have published to the public and set to index. The biggest issue is that there are some articles coming back with hreflang conflicts within page source. I am wondering how to fix this so my site health can increase and the google bots are able to crawl everything appropriately.

 

Also, it seems all of my help center articles have outgoing internal links that contain nofollow attribute (to our main domain and subdomains). This issue says there is a rel="nofollow" attribute that is telling the crawlers not to follow the link, which is NOT recommended for SEO purposes, and rather should let the link juice flow freely.

 

I recently made all my articles visible to the public and a ton of these types of Errors, Warnings, and Notices are now appearing on my Site Audit and hurting my site health. Any advice is greatly appreciated!

 

Thank you 😀

Best answer by Eric Fitz

Thanks for getting in touch, @dan k11​! I can see that our support team replied to you about this issue, so I'll summarize their response here for the benefit of other Connectors!

 

While Intercom's Help Center product is optimised for SEO, it doesn't allow for customisation of nofollow links. We're aware that customers would like to have more control over their SEO options here and this feedback has been logged!

 

Re the hreflang conflicts, we currently have an open issue for this and I'll post an update here once this has been resolved.

View original

    11 replies

    Roy
    Top Expert ✨
    Forum|alt.badge.img+7
    • Roy
    • Top Expert ✨
    • Oct 23, 2020 3:17 AM UTC

    Hi @dan k11​ ,

     

    Q - types of Errors, Warnings, and Notices are now appearing on my Site Audit and hurting my site health

    A - Help Center's are hosted separately from your website and uses subdomains like - Help.mydomain.com.

    Help.mydomain.com can't hurt SEO for mydomain.com.

     

    Q - I am wondering how to fix this so my site health can increase and the google bots are able to crawl everything appropriately

    A - When you are using services like Intercom, help centers are hosted by the service provider and there no options to fully customize the SEO.

     

    Q - This issue says there is a rel="nofollow" attribute that is telling the crawlers not to follow the link, which is NOT recommended for SEO purposes

    A - Nofollow tells Google to that following links we don't trust or not to count the link.

    There several security reasons why service providers like Intercom using Nofollow tags.

     

    Q - I am getting quite a few Errors and Warnings

    A - I think it's not just an error, this is how it's should be for security purposes. 

     

    When you are using a hosted help center, there always be restrictions about full customization of SEO.

    It's not be affected to your main domain name, even one of the most popular SEO tool Ahref using Intercom's help center:

    https://help.ahrefs.com/en/

    🇬🇧 Top of the shop. Cheers from London. 🗓️ Looking for a proper Fin implementation? Book a free call here: https://calendar.app.google/SHhmneXasrrrLF266
    Eric Fitz
    Employee
    Forum|alt.badge.img+5
    • Eric FitzEmployee
    • Employee
    • Answer
    • Oct 27, 2020 11:09 AM UTC

    Thanks for getting in touch, @dan k11​! I can see that our support team replied to you about this issue, so I'll summarize their response here for the benefit of other Connectors!

     

    While Intercom's Help Center product is optimised for SEO, it doesn't allow for customisation of nofollow links. We're aware that customers would like to have more control over their SEO options here and this feedback has been logged!

     

    Re the hreflang conflicts, we currently have an open issue for this and I'll post an update here once this has been resolved.

    • Leo L
    • New Participant
    • Mar 2, 2021 2:32 AM UTC

    @eric f11​ 

     

    "we currently have an open issue for this and I'll post an update here once this has been resolved."

     

    4 mo. passed, any updates?

    • User747
    • New Participant
    • Jul 29, 2021 1:10 AM UTC

    @leo l​ Thanks for posting, this is also affecting our seo.

     

    @eric f11​ Quick suggestion... please check out the screenshot below.

     

    For us who are trying to fix our domain health, it may be easiest for everyone to just add an option in Help Center Settings:

     

    EDIT FROM COMMUNITY MANAGER: I've removed an edited screenshot that was previously posted here, as it's caused confusion with customers, leading them to think that we do in fact has this option in our Help Center settings.

     

    Thank you for your support

    Kevin Bendixen
    Top Expert ✨
    Forum|alt.badge.img+5

    That would be enough for us as well

    • Joey S
    • New Participant
    • Aug 10, 2021 3:20 PM UTC

    @eric f11​ Has there been any progress on this? We would also like to be able to have more control over the links in our documents. Thanks!

    Eric Fitz
    Employee
    Forum|alt.badge.img+5
    • Eric FitzEmployee
    • Employee
    • Aug 12, 2021 8:33 AM UTC

    Hi @joey s​, we haven't shipped any changes to our Help Center's SEO settings recently.

    • Colin P
    • New Participant
    • May 6, 2022 11:12 PM UTC

    This is pretty disappointing after a year+ of waiting.

     

    We'd really like the ability to control the canonical tag as it pertains to content that needs to exist on our site as well as the Intercom-powered subdomain.

    • Luis M11
    • New Participant
    • Jul 25, 2022 9:18 AM UTC

    Hello @eric f11​.

    Any update on the solutions for hreflang and nofollow issues?

    • MichaelS
    • New Participant
    • Jun 21, 2023 10:44 AM UTC

    Update would be great!

    • Anja Mrak
    • New Participant
    • Sep 9, 2024 2:36 PM UTC

    Any updates here?

    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement