Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Location of body text on page - at top or bottom - does it matter for SEO?
Hi - I'm just looking at the text on a redesigned homepage. They have moved all the text to the very bottom of the page (which is quite common with lots of designers, I notice - I usually battle to move the important text back up to the top). I have always ensured the important text comes at the top, to some extent - does it matter where on the page the text comes, for SEO? Are there any studies you can point me to? Thanks for your help, Luke
Web Design | | McTaggart2 -
Have an eBook. What is best practice for SEO?
Hello We have a free eBook - its a great resource and great piece of content. It is available to download on our website here - http://re-timer.com/the-product/how-to-sleep-better/ The book is available as a whole or as individual chapters (i.e. http://re-timer.com/app/uploads/2015/07/Chapter8.pdf?b0df38). The PDF chapters appear to be doing well in Google search for certain keywords. I can't measure this in GA though. I would like the eBook to assist the SEO of my website overall. If I create a web page and 'embedded' the PDF into it will Google still crawl this page? At the moment we are also using this to collect email addresses, this is a nice to have and it is OK if people get the eBook without doing this (if they find a chapter in Google they currently don't have to enter their email address). I'm sure lots of people have eBooks now. What is best practice and the best way to use this as a tool to maximise SEO for the whole website (http://re-timer.com)? Thank you! Laura
Web Design | | LauraFalls1 -
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 -
White Text / Black Background & SEO Impact
Does anyone know of any testing / studies with evidence that Google prefers dark text on a light background vs. light text on a dark background? I have a website that currently has light text on a black background, and really like the way it looks, but am concerned that the style may be hurting SEO. Moreover, redesigning something inverse with the same quality would be a large project and fairly costly, so I'd like to make sure the benefit will really be worth the cost before moving forward.
Web Design | | Bromtec0 -
SEO and Server Connectivity....
Good Morning/Evening Mozzers, I arrive at work this morning with 5 emails from GWT for my separate domains reading, **"Googlebot can't access your site - **Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 39 errors while attempting to connect to your site. Your site's overall connection failure rate is 15.1%." I have passed this on to the Web Dev team to resolve ASAP. My Question, will server connectivity issues harm my rankings? Is there a danger if this continues that URL's could be de-indexed? Input would be greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | RobertChapman0 -
Live Text in Navigation Vs. Image - Does this affect SEO
I recently was asked the question if having live text in the navigation vs and image affect seo. For example, refer to this link http://markup.io/v/avsaenq856kw the navigation highlighted is seperate images. The html elements read : /images/procedures.png"> Live text html reads like this: Breast » What is better for seo value, or does it now matter having live text or an image?
Web Design | | Red_Spot_Interactive0 -
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 -
Drop Down Menus & SEO?
Do these typically have a negative impact on SEO? I know this is kind of a vague question, does it make it harder to spider? Are there SEO friendly ways of coding these? There are so many sites out there that have these, so I've got to assume it's different on a case by case basis.
Web Design | | MichaelWeisbaum0