Why does google hate answers.atlassian.com?

[JamieA]

In order for this not to become just a bad version of the old forum we need to be able to refer to previous answers. However I cannot find any of my previous answers.

Just now I was looking for this, so asked google for "site:answers.atlassian.com GenericValue", but it didn't turn up. This is just an example, all I ever seem to get from google is the tags page or some other aggregate page.

[Jeremy Largman · Accepted solution]

We figured it out. It's a problem in robots.txt that's got a nofollow meta tag. I'll just want to prepare for the inundation of spam before introducing this fix, and I'll update both ANSWERS-254 and this page when it's fixed.

[Jeremy Largman]

Oh, and by the way, copying and pasting doesn't work well in the editor! That's why the above snippet appears in a white box.

[Jeremy Largman]

An update on this issue. Given that we'd really like to address the spam issue before fixing the indexing problem, we're targeting a couple weeks for a release that encompasses both.

[Jeremy Largman]

Another update. We've fixed this now. So far, it looks like Google's returning results a bit better.

[JamieA]

Perhaps any user's first one or two questions/comments/answers have to be approved by a moderator, after that they're free. No self-respecting spammer would bother to come up with a valid question.

[Jeremy Largman]

By the way, there is a benefit to the fact that we're not indexing properly on Google. Once we fix this, Answers will become much more appealing to spammers. I'd like to try to solve both issues at once, but spam mitigation is challenging. Akismet had a bunch of false positives, so I'd like to create rules in the system to prevent spamming. I'm open to any ideas!

[Jeremy Largman]

We're hopefully going to tackle that as well. See ANSWERS-87.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's a bit of a struggle within Answers too - if you've a one-word search, I think it's fine - it checks labels and then body text, but multiple word searches all seem to do OR, whether I put quotes round a phrase, state AND, use && etc. Pretty painful when you want Jira && permission && reporter for example. That should be a handful of results, not 46 pages of 50 answers a page.

[Jeremy Largman]

We know about this problem and just got our SEO team on top of it. I'll update this post when we have a status update.

[Eva]

I found it much easier to just search the old forum itself. I think a lot of questions had already been answer in the old forum and yet you cant search the old questoins here nor google. I wish Atlassian move the old questions/answers here than for users to go both places ...