Confluence and SEO

[RG_SEO]

I think this is a difficult question so apologies in advance and any help would be appreciated!

We currently have a large amount of support center content sitting on our main pages which we don’t think is very effective (mainly basic how to guides). We think it is difficult for visitors to understand and the UI is very poor. In order to solve this we’re currently moving this content onto a subdomain using Confluence, a wiki based team collaboration tool (from a company called Atlassian).

What we’re planning on doing is very much like what Atlassian themselves have done on this page: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ALLDOC/Atlassian+Documentation

What are the SEO issues / dangers that I need to consider before moving this content? I’m assuming that as this content will still be on the same domain then we can minimise link equity / authority loss by setting up re-directs to the new content. Also, has anyone had any experience of using Confluence and whether individual pages can be optimised for SEO? I notice that there are lots of add-ins that can be used, one of which is an SEO add-on which allows you to customise things like meta description tags.

[Everett]

You mentioned that this content was on your "main" pages. If that is so, I wouldn't redirect those pages to a subdomain since I am assuming they still have other, more user-friendly, content on them? Perhaps some examples would help.

However, I don't see any problem with using Confluence to put your documentation / help content onto a subdomain. I will let someone else speak to the SEO capabilities of various Confluence ad-ons though, as I have no experience there.

Just make sure the content no longer appears on your "main" pages once you move it over to the subdomain. If that was the only content on the page, then yes you should redirect it. If there was other important content on the page, just remove the documentation content and leave the rest.

I hope I have understood your question accurately.

[RG_SEO]

Thanks for your reply Everett, that definitely answers the main part of my question,

I'd be interested if anyone has any experience in using the Confluence add-ons for SEO?

[NikCall]

Hello,

I am working to manage large Confluence/ Atlassian subdomains as well and I am curious if you have any best practices to share? I am currently managing it as these subdomains will not effect our root domain with meta data issues, but I do pay attention to critical crawler issues. It is my understand that subdomains do not really help or hurt your root domain unless there are these errors- have you found that to be true?

I am also trying to get roger bot blocked from these subdomains because they are burying me with crawl errors. I can just ignore them, but it is time consuming and masks the errors I really do need to focus on. do you have any insight in this area?

Thank you!

[Everett]

NikCall,

Subdomains aren't so cut and dry, in my experience. It depends on whether Google thinks they're the same site or different sites.

Have you tried setting up your campaign in Moz to track www.domain.com instead of domain.com?

[NikCall]

I will check on that now, I believe I set it up with full URL, but would be very grateful if that would fix part of my issue.

I am not surprised to hear you say subdomains are not so cut and dry... seems like nothing in SEO is If you have time, I would be very interested in hearing any additional insight you have about this. We have large knowledge center/customer facing subdomains, but we also have most of our content on a hubspot subdomain. Essentially I don't want Google to pay attention to any of our knowledge centers, but would love if our hubspot pages could help our root domain authority. thank you!

[Everett]

Hello Nik,

I'd really need to see the site to give an informed opinion on this. If you don't want Google to pay any attention at all to the knowledge centers, you should probably block those in their respective Robots.txt files.

[NikCall]

HI Everett,

Thank you again for the response. Do you have information on how to block robots.txt in confluence? I have been trying to find out how to block Moz from crawling them, but would definitely consider blocking more.

Thank you,