A change to Trello public board settings

[#1]

Trello boards offer four visibility settings to make it easy to share and collaborate with others (or not!): Private, Workspace, Organization, and Public.

In the past, selecting the “Public” visibility setting for Trello boards meant making the content on those boards available in search engine results. This was great for Trello customers who wanted to share their subject matter expertise with the world, or those who used their Trello board as a gathering point for feedback and community. As Trello usage has grown, we’ve learned that the majority of users prefer to keep boards out of search engine results, even if they mark them Public.

Moving forward, Trello will indicate to search engines like Google that new and existing public boards and public cards should not be crawled for display in search engine results.

This change will only affect the appearance of public boards in search engine results. It will not affect the contents of the public board, and users who have the public board URL will still be able to view its contents unless you change the visibility settings of your board using this guide.

Important note: Due to the nature of search engine crawl requests, it may take months to drop specific URLs from search engine results. To expedite the process, owners of the public content can make their request direct to Google: Removing Trello content from Google

More Public Boards resources:

Managing Public Boards Within an Enterprise

Managing Workspace and Board Permissions in Trello Enterprise | Trello

Changing the visibility of a board to public, private, or Workspace

[Sadie Crabtree]

Are the boards still spiderable but simply have the robots.txt or equivalent command issued?

And if the URL to a public board isn't shared on any public webpage, could it get crawled anyway? (i.e. does Trello provide a list of all public boards somewhere that's available to search engines)

[Jenny]

Hi @Sadie Crabtree

1. We’ve marked the boards with ‘noindex’ and will be adding them to robots.txt as well once search engines have had a chance to recrawl the URLs and pick up the changes.

2. We currently list some public boards in the Trello sitemap, as a means to encourage search engines to re-crawl those pages to pick up our recent command to No Index. Once we see the bulk of those changes go into effect, we will be eliminating all public boards from the sitemap, as well as submitting a final request to search engines to drop all public board URLs from the index.