Question
How can I restrict Google from indexing my Help Center?
Answer
You can restrict your Help Center content from appearing in Google search results by modifying your Help Center HTML templates.
To restrict your entire Help Center
- In Guide, click the Customize design icon (
) in the sidebar. - Click the theme you want to edit to open it.
- Click Edit Code and select document_head.hdbs.
- Enter the following line of code as shown below
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
- Click Publish.
31 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
Hello, we don't have this implemented in the Document Head html, because we do want our articles to appear in Google searches. But I'm having a hard time getting results from article body content. For example, I have an FAQ article. If I search for one of the questions in the body of the article, word by word, it still won't appear as a result in Google. Any thoughts?
Hey Alexandra -
Here are a couple of resources that should help you with your SEO so that those show up better:
About SEO in Help Center
How Zendesk uses hreflang tags in the Help Center for SEO
Hi,
currently our document head shows the following:
Thanks!
Melanie
Hi @Melanie,
I've updated the images within the documentation to reflect the new theme editor layout.
You should retain the line of code that exists on line 1 and simply add the new code on an additional line.
Hi,
We have a custom theme designed by Lotus themes which I want to apply to our sandbox. As it is a sandbox, I do not want it indexed. Just want to confirm where to put the "<meta name="robots" content="noindex">" code, as the document_head.hbs file has multiple lines of code whereas your example has only one
The first line in their version of the document_head.hbs is <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />. Would I still enter the <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> line right under that?
Hi Lila,
Yes, that is correct. Just place the code highlighted in this document on a new line below any code that you already have in your document_head.dbs file.
Would it work to add the <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> code directly into the html of a specific article? I have just one article I want to de-list from Google index search.
Hey - I can't find the button in Step 3 - there isn't anything to the right of "Live".
Hey Michael -
Apologies; that layout changed recently and we haven't updated the article yet. It would now look like this:
Here's the announcement about those changes: Themes page UI updates
Hey Nicole,
So where is the link to edit code now?
Thanks
Hi Michael -
If you click on the tile for a theme, the next screen has an "edit code" button on it:
Does this only work for custom themes? We are using the default Copenhagen theme - is there a way to stop this from being indexed in Google? Thanks
Hey Michael,
You would need to be on Guide Professional to edit your Copenhagen theme. Guide Lite will not include this feature unfortunately :-/
As for restricting Google Indexing you can do so using the steps Evan provided above, however, you'd need to be on Guide Professional to have access to this.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
This solution dont apply to the mobile pages with parameter ?mobile_site=true
How can i restrict Google from indexing that?
Hey David,
If the above solution doesn't work for you, you'll most likely need to use the Google Webmaster Tool to exclude the URL of your Help Center page. More information in the following article: How do I exclude a Help Center page from being indexed by Google?
I hope this points you in the right direction!
Is there a way to restrict indexing the homepage? All my articles are now not showing in google but if I type "Support <mycompanyname>" then the third link is a link to our Help Center homepage.
Hi Alex,
You can prevent indexing of the homepage only by adding
to your home_page.hbs template at the top. Google recommends to place it only in the <head> section but they also honor the tag if it's lower down.
Hi,
It doesn't look like there is a way to exclude an individual page from indexing by search engines. Would it be possible to set up the template, so that if the article is tagged with a given Label, say "noindex", then the following line is added to the HTML?
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Thank you
Hi Martin,
Yes, that would be possible. At the top of your article_page.hbs template you can add:
{{#each article.labels}}{{#is identifier 'noindex'}}<meta name="robots" content="noindex">{{/is}}
{{/each}}
Hi Simon,
This works great. It puts the metatag in the <body> of the document but it seems like bots respect that.
My main goal is to noindex some category/section pages. But those don't have any labels. Any suggestions on how to exclude individual section pages from indexing?
Tx,
Martin
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