Web Search Engine Optimization

Scholarly editions built with TEI Publisher are highly interactive: page navigation, facsimile viewers, and most of the reading experience are driven by web components that load content asynchronously after the initial HTML arrives. That architecture is excellent for readers, but it is historically hostile to search engines. Google search does index dynamic content to some extent, albeit with a penalty. But a less diligent crawler would see an empty pb-view and conclude that the page has no text worth indexing, so web search won't find much.

TEI Publisher addresses this with two complementary mechanisms. The base10 profile embeds a server-rendered HTML fragment inside each document view so crawlers receive real text in the first response. The optional Sitemap profile then publishes a complete URL inventory, canonical links, and a robots.txt so crawlers can discover those pages and avoid indexing duplicates or internal paths. Together they produce pages that Google and other search engines can index reliably.