Question about Hiding External Links

[Jim Gilliam]

This help topic gives good information: https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/hide-external-links-from-search-engines/

For corporations using Confluence as an internal knowledge base (the public does not have access), am I correct in thinking that this setting does not apply, right? Other search engines are not allowed to index it by default, so does enabling or disabling Hide External URLs make a difference?

[Himanshu Tiwary · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jim Gilliam ,

In case all that happens inside the Confluence instance is working as an internal knowledge base, with everything being logged in, Google Search Engine will never even try to crawl and index it.

It only works in case you have the “Anonymous Access” option turned on.

In that case, your pages may be crawled and indexed by search engines, but with this configuration option, you control whether they follow external links on those pages.

So in your case:

Your content is already protected by authentication

Your content is not indexed by search engines at all

This option will not make a difference

You may ignore it unless you are planning to expose any of your pages