Help Center/Knowledgebase effects on SEO: Is it worth my time fixing technical issues on no-indexed subdomain pages?

[mglover1988]

We're a SaaS company and have a pretty extensive help center resource on a subdomain (help.domain.com). This has been set up and managed over a few years by someone with no knowledge of SEO, meaning technical things like 404 links, bad redirects and http/https mixes have not been paid attention to.

Every page on this subdomain is set to NOT be indexed in search engines, but we do sometimes link to help pages from indexable posts on the main domain. After spending time fixing problems on our main website, our site audits now flag almost solely errors and issues on these non-indexable help center pages every week.

So my question is: is it worth my time fixing technical issues on a help center subdomain that has all its pages non-indexable in search engines? I don't manage this section of the site, and so getting fixes done is a laborious process that requires going through someone else - something I'd rather only do if necessary.

[GFD_Chris]

It's tough to tell without seeing the help & marketing pages. How similar are they? Generally, these are different as marketing pages generally talk more about user benefits where help pages are more tutorial based. It's likely as long as they aren't 1:1 matches (or very close) that they can both exist.

In the rare event that the help center pages are an exact duplicate of existing marketing site pages, then in theory you should be able to 404/redirect those pages and not worry about them. If there's already another version of the page on the site than there's no need to manage it in two places.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

[mglover1988]

Thanks so much for the answer, Chris! Why are our help articles all out of index?

1. Honestly, main reason is that they have just always been that way from before I arrived at the company, and I've had a variety of other things I've prioritised ahead of addressing help center articles - especially seen as our marketing dept doesn't have any direct control/input over them atm.

2. Part of me would be concerned about creating duplicate content/cannibalization issues with other pages and posts from the main marketing site. There would be a lot of articles to go through in order to individually canonicalise to a preferred piece of content if the article presents a duplication issue with some other content on the site. Do you think this is a legitimate concern? Or am I overthinking?

[GFD_Chris]

Hey!

Is there a particular reason that you want the help articles out of the index? That content may be useful to current users who are querying Google for how to use your solution. It also could be useful to potential users who are looking for specific functionalities. We generally recommend that our SaaS clients index this content.

In terms of a time investment, it's probably still important, especially if your existing users are interacting with the documentation. Personally, to start I'd prioritize any items that can be scaled. I might start with:

1. Removing the global "noindex" tag
2. Fixing mixed content signals
3. Removing global 4xx/3xx
4. Fixing individual 4xx on your highest traffic pages

Try implementing anything globally first and then working to page-level fixes.