Does setting up public access cause Confluence to be indexed in Search Engines?

Question

I need to make a Confluence page public (i.e. accessible to people with no Confluence account) but not indexed in Search Engines. (Making it public appears to be easy enough (see http://bit.ly/1UGhJcy).) In this forum I read a possible solution which is to append "?os_username=&os_password=" after the URL (see http://bit.ly/1XzZ2qd). But it seems to me that this solution is based on the recipient having a username and password; which is not the case for me since these people have no Confluence account. Is there a way to make a page public but not indexed? Thanks.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

The usual trick here is to ask bots not to crawl it.  They still can, but all the big players respect the request.

See https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DISC/Prevent+Search+Engine+Indexing+Using+Robots.txt

Note that on Cloud, Atlassian have that set for you, and I don't think you can change it (yet.  There's a request at https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-5915 )