In some cases, you may want your Help Center content restricted from appearing in Google search results. With the Help Center theme editor, you can easily accomplish this by modifying your Help Center's HTML template.
How to Restrict your entire Help Center
The following instructions will show you how to restrict your entire Help Center from being indexed. Doing so will ensure that your Help Center content does not appear in Google search results.
-
To begin, go to your Help Center and select
Customize design
from the
Admin
menu.
-
Then, on your preferred theme, click
Edit Theme.
-
After opening the Theme Editor, use the drop-down to switch over to the template titled
HTML: Document Head
.
-
Once the Document Head is selected, simply add the following line of code:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
- Then click to Save and Publish these changes.
- Your Help Center will no longer be indexed.
Any questions? Post them here!
Comments
10 comments
Hi,
Just wondering how long it takes after applying the above in the header for Google to stop showing the Help Center.
King Regards
Eric
Hi Eric!
This is dependent on when Google decides to re-index your pages, I believe; it's not something you can control from Zendesk. However, you can request Google to re-index your pages; you can find instructions on that here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6065812?rd=1
Please let me know if you have any other questions!
Hey Eric, just a quick addendum here. Evan, who wrote this tip, also let me know that you can request removal of the existing search results, because they can stick around for a while. You can find more info on that here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals?pli=1
Hi Jessie & Evan,
Thanks for that the above worked great except for one issue which you may or may not know about. The reason out site was still being indexing is due to the robots.txt file not covering all bases. The following was missing, if this could be added to our robots.txt file this will prevent accidental indexing again:
Disallow: /hc
Disallow: /auth
Disallow: /account
If this could be added to the standard template used when adding that meta tag that would be fantastic for other users. In the mean time if anyone has this issue simply use the web tools above and go to URL Removal and enter:
yourzendeskdomain.zendesk.com/hc
Directory Removal
yourzendeskdomain.zendesk.com/auth
Directory Removal
yourzendeskdomain.zendesk.com/account
Directory Removal
This took about a day to apply but is no permanent.
Kind Regards
Eric
If you use this to restrict Google from indexing the site for search, does this also negate the benefit of enabling Google Analytics?
@Sean word is that it shouldn't have any effect on Google Analytics. I'm looking for documentation to back that up, but they are separate platforms, so it shouldn't be an issue.
Is there a way to restrict access to individual guides? We have two KBs with some duplicated guides on each one, and would like to control which ones show up in search.
@Katie there is a way to prevent Google from indexing a specific article as described in this post. Basically, you can accomplish what you're trying to do by restricting access to Help Center content.
Let me know if that works for you.
@nicole thanks, but that doesn't solve our problem. We need the guides to be available to everyone, we just don't want them to show up in search results.
Hey Katie -
I've been checking around internally, and the official word is that there's no way to restrict individual guides from being indexed. Your options are either to put them behind the login or restrict the entire HC from being indexed.
Let me know if you have any further questions!
Best,
Nicole
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