How to Ensure that a TDX Client Portal and Knowledge Base Appear in Search Results

Summary

Some multi-tenant installations of TeamDynamix, such as that used at University of Michigan (teamdynamix.umich.edu), have multiple client portals. For the Eisenberg Family Depression Center, the client portal is identified by /210/ in the URL (/TDClient/210/Portal). Due to each portal being ran independently by different departments or centers, it can be difficult to control site indexing and search engine crawling at the tenant level. This article discusses strategies for getting an individual tenant's client portal - and associated knowledge base - to be found and listed by search engines.

Steps

Initial Setup

1. Ensure the home page (/Portal/Home) of your client portal contains widgets with links to multiple KB articles (e.g., Recent Articles, Popular Articles), links to Questions, and links to some KB categories (with a custom HTML module).
   
    
2. Ensure there are incoming links to your portal from multiple sites, such as your department webpage, public social media posts, GitHub, etc. These links should be up by at least 24 hours before proceeding.
3. Ensure the organization's (parent tenant, or neighborhood) robots.txt file is accessible and it is not blocking web crawlers. For example, University of Michigan TDX client portals would use  https://teamdynamix.umich.edu/robots.txt, which in turn allows crawling of /TDClient/ by any user agent.

Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex

1. Submit your client portal home page to a search engine submission tool (e.g. freewebsubmission.com)

2. Wait at least 24 hours, then try searching for the contents of your client portal using these search filters:
   site:teamdynamix.<domain> inurl:/<portal_number>/
site:teamdynamix.<domain> "/<portal_number/"
   Example for finding the Depression Center client portal in DuckDuckGo: site:teamdynamix.umich.edu inurl:/210/

   

   
   Example for finding the Depression Center client portal in Bing: site:teamdynamix.umich.edu "/210/"

   

    

Google

1. Create a new property ID and web stream for your portal in Google Analytics. In the Data Streams page, enter the URL up to the slash before your portal ID (ending in /TDClient).
   
    
2. Enter the web stream property ID that starts with G- in the TDX Admin portal, under Settings -> Google Analytics Configuration -> Web Property ID.
    
3. In your portal's home page, refresh and then look at the source code (right-click -> view page source).
4. Ensure the top of the source code contains a script from googletagmanager.com that has your G- web property ID in its URL.
    
5. Go to the Google Search Console and sign in using the same account used to create the web property ID.
6. Create a new Property using the URL for the home page of your portal (ending in /Portal/Home), and click Continue.
    
7. Ownership should automatically be verified. If it does not, wait 24 hours and ensure the previous steps were completed correctly, including using the correct URLs.
    
8. Once verified, click Go to Property.
9. Enter the URL to your portal's home page (ending in /Portal/Home) in the "Inspect any URL" box at the top, and hit Enter.
    
10. The results will likely read "URL is not on Google." Click "Request indexing" to request that Google crawls your home page. After a few minutes, you should see a success message.
     
11. Repeat steps 5-10 for for URLs ending with /KB and /Questions. After doing this, you should now have three properties in Google Search Console:
    
     
12. Google may take 1-2 days, or possibly a little longer, to crawl your site.
13. After a few days, return to the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to check the status of the crawling.
    
     
14. Once Search Console shows that your site has been crawled, verify the search results with a query like the one used for DuckDuckGo above.
    site:teamdynamix.<domain> inurl:/<portal_number>/
    Example for finding the Depression Center client portal in Google: site:teamdynamix.umich.edu inurl:/210/
    
    
    
     

Resources

• None.

About the Author

Gabriel Mongefranco is a Mobile Data Architect at the University of Michigan Eisenberg Family Depression Center. Gabriel has over a decade of experience in data analytics, dashboard design, automation, back end software development, database design, middleware and API architecture, and technical writing.   |   |