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How can I restrict Google from indexing my Help Center?

Evan Dalsted
  • Edited

Question

How can I restrict Google from indexing my Help Center?

Answer

You can add a noindex meta to your theme's code so your articles do not appear in Google searches or any other search engines. 

To restrict your entire Help Center

  1. In Guide, click the Customize design icon () in the sidebar.
  2. Click the theme you want to edit to open it.
  3. Click Edit Code and select document_head.hdbs.
  4. Enter the following line of code as shown below 
    <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

  5. Click Publish.

For more information, see the article: Preventing Google from indexing a specific article.

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8 Comments

  • Daniel James

    Hello, 

    There's some chatter that leads me to believe this might be possible... is there a way to allow search results only for the main help center home page? With the goal being, to not clog up search results with all of our articles, but if someone wanted to search "Company name help center" it could appear? 

    0
  • Michael Froeming
    Zendesk Customer Care

    Hi Daniel,

    Here are a couple options:

    You can prevent Google from indexing a specific article as mentioned in this article: Preventing Google from indexing a specific article 

    Or, you can exclude a Help Center page from being indexed by Google as discussed here: How do I exclude a Help Center page from being indexed by Google 

    Best,

    Michael Froeming | Senior Customer Advocacy Specialist

    0
  • Jose Poblet

    I have added the meta data to the document_head.hbs template. Then, I requested at the URL Inspector on the Google Search Console, the removal of the URL's under "https://mydomain.zendesk.com/hc/", however, after a couple of days the request is still 'processing' on the console and I can still get results when searching for specific articles. We need to remove those search results asap. Do you know how much time this pending request could take to process?

    Thanks

    Jose

    0
  • Patrick

    Is there a specific request to also do this in other search engines like Bing? 
    How can we remove the entries that are listed in Bing already? We applied the no-index tag but there are already some entries in the search index off Bing and we need to get them out
    Thanks

    0
  • Kel S.

    Here's a link from Bing on how to block the URL from webmasters:

    https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/how-can-i-remove-a-url-or-page-from-the-bing-index-37c07477

    "This will prevent the URL from appearing on the search results within 24 hours."

    0
  • Brett Bowser
    Zendesk Community Manager

    Hey Patrick,

    I was able to track down the following article that may help point you in the right direction: Content Removal: Report Broken Links or Outdated Cache Pages

    I hope this helps!

    0
  • Arminder Singh

    How long does it take for the no-index changes to kick in? We added the no-index code in document_head.hbs last week and articles are still showing up in Google search results.

    0
  • Sonny
    Zendesk Customer Care
    Hi Arminder, 
     
    If you are still seeing your Help Center being index by Google search, you can try to utilise the Remove URL's feature available in your Google Webmasters Tool account. This feature indicates which page should be removed from the Search Engine Results Pages by Google.

     
    You can verify your account with Google Webmasters Tool by adding a meta tag to the Header of the Help Center, as described here. If you wish, you can restrict Google from indexing all the content of your Help Center, by following the steps described in this article: How can I restrict Google from indexing my Help Center?
     
    Thank you! 
    0

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