Custom Domains and SEO

[Debra Eskinazi Stockdale]

When our company went from Cloud to Server, we were immediately notified that Server would be deprecated and we'd be pushed back to Cloud when Server would finally sunset.

At that time, we were told that SEO would be hard to track with the fixed rooturl as opposed to a custom domain, which is why we went the direction of the Server?

• Is that still the case?
  
  

You appear to offer a solution for a custom domain, but customers are limited in their choices of how that domain may be customized correct?

For example, I have to choose some sequence like the following within Atlassian's list of available options:

subdomain.keyword.rooturl.tld

• How can I continue to use docs[dot]treasuredata[dot]com AND have the SEO working properly to satisfy the folks with the marketing hats? Please explain exactly how that will work effectively with all the moving parts and redirects etc?

[Brant Schroeder]

@Debra Eskinazi Stockdale It would be best to move to Data Center.  You could then keep your current setup in place.  Cloud currently would not be able to support what you are after but should in the future https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-6999 

[Debra Eskinazi Stockdale]

@Brant Schroeder 

Thank you. How does that work? Is Data Center truly an optimal solution for public facing technical documentation?

Debra

[Brant Schroeder]

@Debra Eskinazi Stockdale Data Center is just the high availability version of server that Atlassian will continue to support.  You can use it for public facing technical documentation.  You can easily upgrade you server instance to Data Center without having to change anything you are doing.  So if you are happy with server then you could easily just upgrade to Data Center.

[Debra Eskinazi Stockdale]

Thanks. Because this discussion is also for data collection in determining our next steps. Can you also clearly define which of the parts of my initial question cannot be fulfilled by Cloud? I’m looking for the why. Is it the SEO or the redirects or the true custom domain? All of it? 

[Brant Schroeder]

@Debra Eskinazi Stockdale 

For cloud SEO should not be an issue because you would be looking at the pages not the domain.  This would have been the same back in the day when you switched.    The custom domain is not possible at this time.  If you have redirects you would just have to update them.  The issue is that could be a large amount depending on what you are doing.

[Brant Schroeder]

@Debra Eskinazi Stockdale Just wanted to let you know that custom domains are now available via early access and soon will be available to everyone.  https://support.atlassian.com/organization-administration/docs/add-a-custom-domain/ 

[Brant Schroeder]

@Debra Eskinazi Stockdale can you accept this answer to help others?

[Ya3melo]

What worked for us was moving our documentation to a custom domain and getting manual redirects set up properly. Our traffic from Google went up a bit after that. We also did some SEO Outsourcing to make sure our site structure and meta tags were clean, which helped make the whole setup easier to manage without diving too deep into technical stuff ourselves.

[Lasourme]

I see it's been a while since you've posted, but I just wanted to ask if anyone's had luck improving search visibility using custom domains with Confluence Cloud recently. I'm also wondering if anyone has tested domain forwarding versus masked redirects. Curious how your SEO results measured up in either case. I'm finding mixed opinions out there and would love to hear what actually worked for others.