Confluence and 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.
-
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,
-
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.
-
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!
-
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?
-
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!
-
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?
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
New To SEO Management, I just want to double check that my idea will work.
I am new to SEO management. I had a 3 month SEO copy writing internship and a 5 month SEO temp job. In both I mostly wrote copy, but I've been teaching myself SEO on the side, I became Google certified. I ended up getting a telemarketing job and somehow the conversation of SEO came up and I winded up managing their SEO for 12 dollars an hour. They say that every lead generated from the website that turns into a sale will be worth 10 dollars and if and when the sales exceed my paycheck I will starting making commission so long as it stays above my hourly. SEO is very fun and this is like my dream job. They are leaving the planning 100% up to me and I want to make sure that what I am doing will work. My plan is as follows: Part 1: Page Authority via backlinks and social media We are health care brokers and my boss, the owner has a lot of contact. He is talking with large unions like, "The Teamsters," and large company retirment groups like, "Blue flame," which is apparently in some way connected to DTE or GE. Long story short, I am trying to get him to convince them to give us a back link to our main page. He also has a ton of clients that own companies. This is good because they may be persuaded to give us backlinks too. In addition, the tech guy thinks he can implement something where we can get a google +1, facebooks likes/shares, twitter likes and shares and pintrest pin it's that would be a part of an email that we send to people within the list of 12,000 clients. From what I can see, from the client base and the people we are working with we should be able to raise the page authority substantially despite the fact that the site is only a few months old and is not yet out of the sand box. I have been slowly picking off each error with SEO MOZ's website crawling. Part 2: Making a Insurance Jargon Dictionary Guide For The Tri-purpose of gathering traffic, proving our professionalism and helping people understand semi-complex insurance jargon. I could build these 2-3 keywords would be addressed per page and they would be defined in a way to help people looking for terms understand them, while simultaneously netting a strong keyword density and a strong page. I think as far as I can tell there are no issues. Part 3: The dictionary pages will pull in new traffic and the home page will receive links and distribute link juice to the sub-pages. This subpages will guide traffic back to the main page with no-follow links to direct people from the unique termed landing pages to the home page for insurance processing. As far as I can tell my logic is solid and on paper this should work. Am I missing anything (like key details, flaws in my plan)?
Web Design | | Tediscool0 -
Booking Engine SEO Question
Hello, I am working on a travel site-mostly content based, but for the deals section of the site, we were thinking of being powered by expedia...if we go with a booking engine (Expedia) will that hurt us with regards to SEO? If Google is looking for content and not another booking engine how can we overcome this? Do you think this approach is positive? any thoughts or advice on this, thanks so much.
Web Design | | lanigreg0 -
Are Carousels Bad for SEO?
My real estate web site was migrated form Drupal to Wordpress last July. The ranking have dropped a lot since migration. One of the things we changed is that we have added two carousels to the home page. Most of the text is below the carousels. Is this bad for SEO? Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan1 -
Can white text over images hurt your SEO?
Hi everyone, I run a travel website that has about 30 pre-search city landing pages. In a redesign last year we added large "hero" images to the top of the page, and put our h1 headlines on top of them in white. The result is attractive, but I'm wondering if Google could be reading this page as "white text on white page", which is an obvious no-no, especially if it could seem that we're trying to hide text. Here's an example: http://www.eurocheapo.com/paris/ H1: Expert reviews of cheap hotels in Paris I should add that our SERPs for these city pages has dropped (for "Cheap hotels in X"), but it could obviously be related to other issues. Any advice would be appreciated. Many thanks! Tom
Web Design | | TomNYC0 -
Would iFrames From a Beta3 Help the SEO Value of Domain?
What I understand as of now: Google does crawl iframes, but attributes the SEO value of the content within them to their original site. (Let me know if I'm mistaken.) What I need to know: If I were to iframe a section of a beta3.domainname.com site into a domainname.com site, does this beta3 attribute any SEO value to the domainname.com site? Essentially - Does good content on a from a beta3.domainname.com (which is mainly just a naked piece of content) bring any benefit to the domainname.com version of the site when it is iframed into the domainname.com site?
Web Design | | SmokewagonKen0 -
Best Forum Platform from an SEO perspective
Hi All, I am looking to start a eCommerce business and would like to centre the user engagement of the site around a forum. Can anyone suggest a forum platform that adopts good SEO practice? So far my considerations are; phpBB vBulletin Wordpress with bbPress plugin Wordpress with Tal.ki plugin Anyone used these with great success? Do you have another suggestion? I am simply in the preliminary stage of sourcing something and am eager to here your thoughts... Thanks in advance... Dan
Web Design | | djlaidler0 -
I've set up my own site which is still fairly new but I'm a bit concerned that there is a bloackage SEO wise somewhere because when I try to crawl the site on SEOmoz it only crawls one page.
I'm really baffled and none of my research has shed much light on it. My url is www.emporiumofmanliness.co.uk I'd really appreciate any help! Thanks
Web Design | | JoshED0 -
Should I Remove URL extentions for SEO?
We are having a developer design our website with Magento. I noticed the main pages such as About Us have no file extention in the URL. But the product pages have a .html file extention. I was once told to remove the file extentions. Are there benefits to removing the .html file extension and if so, is there a way we can do this using Magento?
Web Design | | hfranz0