Confluence Cloud SEO Requirement

[Shannon]

We are planning to implement Jira Service Desk (Cloud) with the adjoined Confluence Knowledge Base (Cloud). One of our requirements for Knowledge Base is that the articles are publicly available and rank in the top 5 of Google results as our customer base currently uses Google to find answers up to 90% of the time.

I would like some level of confidence that we'll be able to get our articles to rank in the top five, so I'm looking for other's who've used Confluence Cloud to confirm they've had success. My concern comes from struggles I've seen with Confluence server products, struggles that have been mitigated with plugins for server that aren't available for the cloud product. 

[Conrado Maggi]

@Conrado Maggi content removed;  please take a look at our guidelines for marketplace partners, particularly around necroposting, here.  Thanks!

[Sofie-Anh Duranceau]

Looking forward to answers here. We have not done some deep exercise on SEO but so far we are struggling to get any kind of results. We have the same need for our documentation and KB that is often through google search. 

[Shannon]

We have an SEO consultant who has said that the fact that we can't domain the knowledge base as our .com that we will really struggle to get the articles to rank unless we are able to create enough "link juice" by linking to individual KB articles from our domain, which we plan to do now. We won't know if it works until we actually launch it, but it's not a desired solution at all. 

I would love to hear how others have succeeded or struggled to accomplish this. 

[Guido Leenders]

We had the same problem too when moving from Help & Manual to Confluence. Confluence is great (and relatively cheap) for collaboration but content is hard to find using Google.

We solved it great using a combination of Cloudfront and Scroll Viewport (an add-on). Viewport publishes it to a site they host, which is nice, but not good enough. After that we added AWS Cloudfront in front of it mapping the host name to one domain of our own (in this case https://documentation.invantive.com/kb).

With cloudfront we have replaced some css and background images too to make it a little nicer. Google rankings have significantly improved (even very specific texts could not be found, but are now on top). Google page speed increased from Confluence itself 18/29, over Scroll Viewport 47/86 to 60/91 for the same content. Some performance improvements could not be made easily; there remains some work to be done by Scroll Viewport.