Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in ensuring that your website appears among the top results when users search for relevant topics on search engines like Google.
In addition to your homepage, search engines also crawl other areas of your website, including your digital catalogs, so it's important that you optimize these just like you would your business' website.
📖 This article explains:
How to enable/disable indexing on your Flipbook
💡 Indexing is enabled by default on all iPaper Flipbooks. If you do not want your digital catalog to be listed in search results, please disable indexing.
Enabling/disabling indexing on your Flipbook is easy:
Navigate to the Flipbook for which you want to enable/disable indexing.
Click on the Flipbook Settings pane.
Select the General tab.
From the vertical menu on the left, select SEO.
In the SEO options, under Indexing you can choose whether indexing is:
Enabled – this allows search engines to index your Flipbook
Disabled – this prevents search engines to index your Flipbook
Enabled if embedded – this allows search engines to index your Flipbook only if it is embedded on another URL, like your website.
The Title field is where you can give your Flipbook a title that will be used by search engines when indexing your digital catalog. If you don’t define a title, the name of the Flipbook will be used, by default.
The Meta description field is where you can add text that will be used by search engines to let visitors know what your digital catalog is about, before they click on it. If left empty, indexed text from the first page will be used.
What in your Flipbook is indexable, and how to optimize it
With indexing enabled on your Flipbook, search engines will be able to crawl it, and present it as part of their search results to relevant search queries. The more relevant, or better SEO-optimized, the title and meta descriptions are, the greater the likelihood that your Flipbook will rank higher up in search results.
We’ve got some tips and tricks to help you optimize your Flipbook, but we’ll get to that a little later.
First, let’s go into what in your Flipbook can, and cannot, be indexed by search engines. In short:
✅ All textual content in iPaper Flipbooks can be indexed by search engines.
❌ It is not possible for search engines to index images within your Flipbooks.
Optimizing Your Digital Catalog for SEO
Making sure that your digital catalog is search engine optimized is vital if you rely on traffic coming from search engines. The more accurate and descriptive your title and meta description are, the more likely it is your digital catalog will show first in search results.
We’ve got a handy guide that can help you get creative in optimizing your digital catalog for search engine indexing, here:
Why images in your Flipbooks are not indexable
Images within your Flipbooks, cannot be indexed by search engines.
We’ve decided not to allow the indexing of images for several reasons:
While some search engines can index text within images, many leaflets often contain small text and have limited resolution, which reduces the accuracy of OCR. To address this, iPaper incorporates the text content of images directly into the Flipbook code, making it indexable by Google. Thus, the actual images are not necessary for indexing purposes.
iPaper intentionally avoids serving images for image-based searches. For instance, displaying a specific, single page of your Flipbook in a Google Image search result is not desirable. We prioritize the overall user experience of and present your Flipbook as a cohesive medium rather than individual image search results.
Typically, Flipbook catalogs have a limited lifespan. As such, images may already be outdated by the time they are indexed. In addition to this, search results, such a direct link to a product page on your webshop would in most cases be more relevant to your visitors than a page in your catalog. Product pages will typically rank higher and provide more up-to-date information.
Should you have any questions about your Flipbook, and whether it should be indexed by search engines or not, our Customer Care team is here to help. Reach out to us via the messenger in the corner, and we'll take it from there. ✌️