Confluence Public Space Not Being Indexed by Google

[André Hausmann]

Hi we are using our Confluence Cloud space as publicly accessible documentation for our customers:
https://beprint.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PL/overview

The space is set to be publicly available without login, and we have created a large amount of content there. However, the pages are not being indexed by Google or other search engines. We have already submitted sitemaps and tried several measures on our side, but none of them lead to indexing.

Could you please check or confirm:

1. Whether this space is allowed to be indexed by search engine crawlers?

2. Whether there are any restrictions or default settings that could prevent indexing (e.g., robots.txt, meta tags, space permissions)?

3. If there is a recommended configuration or documentation for enabling indexing of public Confluence Cloud spaces?

We appreciate your help. Thank you in advance.

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@André Hausmann According to this page: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/how-secure-are-public-links/ 

Can someone Google a public link?

Atlassian has taken all necessary steps within its capability to make sure search engines do not index our public links.

This means that public links are not indexed by search engines, which means no one will be able to find the public link in a Google search. They need the actual public link.

Unless something has changed and Atlassian has not updated this page, I think this answers your question.

[Robert Hean]

Heya @André Hausmann - Sorry to hear you're running into issues!

Curious if you could provide more info, especially what suggests your pages aren't being indexed? Asking as I could find your site by searching for a phrase from one (Specifically "An dieser Stelle erhalten Sie Hilfe zur Benutzung" shows this page https://beprint.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PL/overview in search results).

[André Hausmann]

Thanks for your question.
If you check which pages and content are listed in Google

you can try with this in google

you will see that only the first page is indexed. None of the internal links or subpages from this public Confluence space are being indexed at all.

The landing page itself gets indexed by Google, but none of the internal links or subpages are being indexed. It seems that search engines (and also sitemap tools) are unable to follow any internal links on the public Confluence pages.

We tested this using several sitemap generator tools (both online and offline). All of them can fetch the first public page, but none of them are able to detect or follow the internal links, therefore no deeper content is recognized or indexed.

So even though the content has been public for more than 2 months and we submitted the sitemap multiple times to Google Search Console, none of the underlying pages are appearing in Google search results.

We suspect that Confluence’s public page rendering may be preventing crawlers from accessing internal navigation links.

Could you please check:

Whether public Confluence pages include all required attributes for search engine crawling, and

If there is a known issue or configuration setting required to allow crawlers to follow internal links?

Thank you in advance — I hope the explanation is clear.
We appreciate your help.