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Google Cannot Index Public Spaces: Confluence does not permit indexing

James Bourne

Hello all,

Atlassian Confluence, hosted in cloud. Trialing it to determine whether it is usable for Internet facing product documentation and other knowledge base articles.

Whilst pages can be crawled (per robots.txt directive), they cannot be indexed (per per page robots meta directive).

Where can this setting be adjusted?

Thanks in advance.

Accepted answers

All comments

Brant Schroeder

@James Bourne I am not aware of a feature that allows you to do this within Confluence.

What you could do is manually request that Google remove the specific URL from their indexing using the Google Webmaster tools.

There are some feature requests that relate to this here that you could vote for.

James Bourne

Thanks for this. This is not about URL removal. It's about getting webpages spidered and indexed by Google. The problem is Confluence itself, and the inclusion of a specific meta tag in the page header which contradicts robots.txt.

Robots.txt contains the following:

Allow: /wiki/

The Public page contains:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

How do I configure Confluence so that it does not contain the meta tag and Public Spaces are fully indexable and searchable via Google?

Brant Schroeder

@James Bourne sorry misread that. I am not aware of a way to remove that. Did you set the space up for anonymous access? https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/make-a-space-public/

James Bourne

No worries. I don't think I was clear in my initial question. Apologies. Yes, it's setup publicly for anonymous access and I can access it anonymously via a private browser tab (or other non-tracked browser instance). You can't actually test the URL in Google Webmaster tools as the URL is <site>.atlassian.net/wiki and clearly, I don't have access to that TLD.

Kristian Klima_gtcuat

Hi @James Bourne

We're using Confluence for our public facing documentation..... Confluence works as a CMS/LCM tool, our website is made in an app called Scroll Viewport.

The great thing is full Google Analytics integration and excellent SEO. Many of our pages are in the top 5 search results for some generic terms in the industry, often beating our corporate site and I'm not moving a finger to achieve that - except for writing good content.

There are other similar apps in the marketplace that de-confluence your doc site, improve experience, integrate with GA and, yes, make your site visible (Refined, Spacecraft, Instant Websites)

James Bourne

Thanks, Kristian. So what you are saying is that Confluence Public Spaces are hopeless from an Internet-facing document and knowledge base perspective and you have to buy third-party plugins to make them look OK and for them to work as expected (i.e. SEO and spidering). I've been down this route in the past with WordPress and the horror of that product's plugins. It just becomes a headache to manage and maintain.

James Bourne

Sorry, what are/is LCM, Refined, Spacecraft, and Instant Websites?

Chris Matkaris

Hello @James Bourne

LCM stands for Learning Content Management (System)

Refined, Spacecraft, and Instant Websites are Marketplace Apps that allow you to create a separate website and connect the existing Confluence content.

The documentation link that @Kristian Klima, the great, shared is not under atlassian.net if you notice. It is another website created with Scroll Viewport as Kristian said, and as you can also see at the end of the footer! But that content is created and managed in Confluence.

Regarding your initial question, I am suprised to see a public page containing the noindex directive! Could you please share an example URL?

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