We'd like to make it easier for people to use Google to find our help documentation content and link to it, particularly because we want to "single source" some guidance content that needs to ship with our product and is going to be useful for folks browsing our technical content on the web. There are two challenges I see with doing this with HelpStudio that I'd like to hear your thoughts on:
1. External Links to content: It doesn't seem to me that either to an end user or to us editing the site there's a straightforward way to get a link to content that, if followed, would result in you getting back to the whole documentation in frame. I get that this isn't technically trivial - it'd mean the link would likely need to be to an outer frame page and pass a parameter for the specific page to navigate to. It'd be nice if users could obviously click a button in the toolbar above the help content and get a portable link to the current page.
2. SiteMap: Google really likes a sitemap.xml to index from, and in our case this might have the added advantage of letting us exclude some content from Google that is likely either noise or perhaps more sensitive than we'd like (I admit it - we submit features but not defects to Google - if you want to find defect reports, we have that information on our site). For the sitemap to work right it'd have to know what the current URL is from the outside (see #1).
To see how we're showing the help in context, go to www.GibraltarSoftware.com/Support/Documentation.aspx.
