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Confluence and SEO

Emily Johnson

I have publicly available confluence pages that show up very far down in a web search. For example our company's name is part of our wiki's domain name, and when you search for our company it doesn't show up for several pages of results. I've tweaked everything I can't think of for SEO purposes, but I'm wondering if this is a confluence issue? Anyone have this experience or have any advice?

Thanks!

Emily

Accepted answers

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Jeremy Largman

I'm eager to see what people have to say about this. I have thought a bit about this with our Knowledge Bases here at Atlassian (to a greater or lesser degree of success), and mostly have focused on page titles. I think I'm lucky because confluence.atlassian.com is linked from lots of other sites and because our documentation is hosted there, has a high Google rank.

One little tidbit I've learned - try not to use characters that change the name of the page title in the URL (question marks are the most common culprit).

Not what you're asking here, but related - check out the Google Analytics Reporting plugin by Appfusions.

Emily Johnson

Thanks for the input, Jeremy. One of our pages was blogged about on our blog, tweeted a ton, and linked to by some industry publications, and it still hardly shows up in searches (maybe 4 pages down). The name is very straightforward. But good tip! And thanks for responding.

John Sloat

+1 to everything Jeremy said.

Here's another tip: if you haven't already, change the name of your instance's home page from "Dashboard" to something a bit more descriptive and search engine friendly. Instructions here: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Modify+Confluence+Interface+Text

Eager to hear any other solutions you come up with! It'd also be good to visit your instance to see if I could get some more ideas...feel free to email me at jsloat at atlassian dot com if you'd rather not post it here.

Andrew Frayling

I'm sure you've already thought of this, but it might be worth creating a sitemap of your site using something like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and submitting that to Google Webmaster Tools It's not going to boost your search rank, but it would give a view of what Google knows about your site and may give you some pointers if certain keywords are not as prominent on your site as you thought they were.

Andrew.

unknown

We are finding that pages created with Confluence don't rank at all in Google. We are using Confluence On Demand. I'm wondering if we made a mistake somewhere or are missing a basic setting.

For example, take a very, very targeted topic such as the "RubyGem for MailUp". Here is the Confluence page: https://mailup.atlassian.net/wiki/display/mailupapi/RubyGem

Now, do a Google search:

http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1LENP_enUS468US468&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=rubygem+mailup

There are several results, but the Confluence page mentioned above (which is not a new page) is nowhere to be found.

We can't figure out why. Any ideas?

John Sloat

@MailUP USA

I did a Google search for your domain, mailup.atlassian.net, which returned 0 results from your domain. This suggests to me that the whole site is not indexed.

I also searched for "atlassian.net/wiki" to confirm that there are in fact other OnDemand Confluence instances being indexed by Google.

Beyond that I'm pretty out of my depth Have you filed a support ticket?

unknown

I did and unfortunately their reply was not very helpful. Here it is:

Thanks for your email. Confluence OnDemand does have a few issues regarding search rank that can be tweaked for a better rank on search engines. Please read more about those methods here. I'm afraid we do not have strict documentation or evidence for search rank in Confluence OnDemand, though.

The link in the reply is to this very thread!!

We have several links into our Confluence-based documentation, so GoogleBot has definitely, already found the documentation, but yet it is not indexing it. So there must be an issue with Confluence OnDemand.

We encourage the Atlassian team to take a very close look at the issue because it is a very relevant one. For example, if you have Confluence as part of your documentation (together with other Web-based content) and use a service like Google Site Search to help your customers search all of your Web-based help, content from Confluence will not show up, which is a major problem.

This issue at the moment, at least for our company, very negatively affects our customer's ability to find the help information they need, so it becomes a deal-breaker, quite honestly.

We hope there will be a solution soon.

SimonS

The issue may be one with Google Site Search. I believe that when you set up Site Search, you provide your company domain to help customize search results. Since mailup.atlassian.net is not using the mailup domain, but instead using the atlassian.net domain, you may have to tweak or adjust the Google Site Search Settings for the indexing to work properly.

If you have double-checked the Site Search settings, but are still having issues, please contact Google. If they decide that your Site Search is setup properly and should be indexing your Confluence OnDemand instance, please file a support ticket as John Sloat mentioned.

-Simon

unknown

Hi Simon, thank you, but the issue is definitely not limited to Site Search. The issue is with Google not indexing Confluence OnDemand pages.

unknown

Following our report of the indexing issue above, the problem was escalated within Atlassian.

We are happy to report that the issue was addressed successfully and in a timely manner.

Google started indexing our Confluence OnDemand page shortly after the fix was introduced. The latest site:mailup.atlassian.net report on Google shows 40 pages as having been indexed (as of 6/25/2012).

We also see that Canonical URLs were added: also very much appreciated!

We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the Atlassian team for acknowledging the existence of the problem, for raising the priority of this important issue, and for quickly addressing it.

Thanks again!

Julia Wester

It would be nice if you didn't have to do custom code for this (or do a language pack!)

Julia Wester

It would be great to have more metadata being put in pages in Confluence without having to adjust the code + add plugin like the TechTime EasySEO plugin. Is this on the roadmap to include this functionality?

Adrien Ragot 2

I had the same problem so I created a plugin to create a sitemap.xml and a robots.txt file for Confluence: SEO Manager.

Adrien Ragot 2

I've had the same problem so I've shared my tools and tips. My pages rank ~ok in Google now. I would benefit a lot from meta tags in pages I think.

Google penalizes slow websites -> Install a cache (example: How to cache a Confluence instance)
Google penalizes websites where the root page is a redirect -> While you're installing a cache, use it to redirect the root page (see the previous How To),
Google penalizes websites replicating content -> Don't make both http and https public.
Have a robots.txt and a sitemap.xml file -> I'm sharing my tool SEO Manager for Confluence,
Have meta tags on each page -> I've just added that feature to my SEO Manager. Work complete

Cheers,

Adrien

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