Confluence Public cloud works with Google SEO

[Mark Jason BRIONES]

Does Confluence public cloud works smoothly withe Google SEO? Is there any documentation that we can look on this topic?

[Sven Schatter _Lively Apps_ · Accepted solution]

Hi Mark,

While you can certainly have a public Confluence space and have the content in there be indexed by Google, you'll need to know that this is not what Confluence is made for.

Confluence is not SEO optimized and your content will therefore not be very easily findable. If you want to have a public documentation built on Confluence that looks great and is SEO optimized, I'd highly recommend taking a look at something like Scroll Viewport for Confluence.

Quick comparison:

Take for example this piece of documentation from a public Confluence space. If I google for "custom charts for jira cloud migration" it is only the third result that shows up for me.

We ourselves use Scroll Viewport for the documentation of our apps. If I google for something like "pocketquery cloud ip" I'll get this page as the very first result.

I know this is only one example, so I recommend you try to go ahead and compare this with a few other pages and form your own opinion. Hope this helps! :)

Cheers,
Sven

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

Thanks for the shout out @Sven Schatter _Lively Apps_

Hi @Mark Jason BRIONES

You can also check out the pages on help.k15t.com to see how those perform. While we don't have any public pages to compare this to, I hope it's helpful.

This was one of the main use cases we built Scroll Viewport for. Let me know if you'd ever like to see how we use it.

[Mark Jason BRIONES]

Thanks Sven and Matt for the answer. Appreciate it. Cheers!

[Cortlandt _]

To expand upon the original question ...
What can be done with Confluence itself to increase visibility to search engines & improve SEO?

For instance:

• Put links from the organizations main web page domain to pages in the Confluence site?
• Modify the meta data in the Confluence page to improve SEO?
• Host the Confluence web from a domain that is the same as the domain which hosts the organizations main web site?

[Conrado Maggi]

Confluence is not SEO optimized and your content will therefore not be easily findable in google.

If you want to have a public documentation built on Confluence that ranks good google you need to host it (ideally) under your own a domain on a SEO optimized template using something like:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1227534/deskbase-on-brand-websites-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

By having your knowledge base under your own domain you benefit not only from a branding perspective but also the SEO authority of your brand.

Finally, is very common for customer to google "How to do XXX on YYY product. When your knowledge base is hosted on your own domain, it is easy to rank #1 for this type of searches.

[Cortlandt _]

Can you contrast your solution with K15t's Scroll Viewport?

Scroll Viewport generates pages from Confluence pages but only partially supports Confluence macro and editor features.    For example, the captions on images (screenshots) are not published by Scroll Viewport.

[Laura Parraga -K15t-]

I'm Laura from the Scroll Viewport team. I just wanted to let you know that with our latest Scroll Viewport release we introduced support for image captions. Your captions from Confluence should now show in Viewport!

[Cortlandt _]

Good to see captions supported.  

Anything in the pipeline to support horizontal page layout (that is, columns)?    With Scroll Viewport you lose Confluence's Layout and image wrap features.   
Seems like the option is to convert pages to put content in tables -- a technique deprecated amount web developers a generation ago.

[Laura Parraga -K15t-]

@Cortlandt _  We won't support image wrap for now, as there are some technical blockers and also some concerns about how appropriate such a view is on a help center, which is meant for help content and where the help center theme just lays out content differently than in Confluence.

While we have similar concerns for Confluence's layout option, we think it's likely that we'll add support for this at some point. However, we still have to evaluate this feature in more detail to be able to promise anything more concrete.

If you have specific examples of pages with the layout option enabled that you would like to display in your Viewport site, please feel free to forward them to help@k15t.com. This will help us a lot with our next steps!