How can I hide content from the search in Confluence?

[Mick Davidson]

Evening All,

I want to hide the content of a page from the search but can't find any way of doing so. I want the content to remain visible on the page however, and the page must still be visible to all those with the correct permissions.

The page itself has dozens of links (to non-Confluence and internal addresses) with plenty of words that just clutter up the search results.

I've tried the Code macro but that doesn't do it, and none of the other macros seem suitable.

Cheers.

[Matthew J. Horn · Accepted solution]

There is no way to exclude a page from showing up in the Confluence search. You could either use a more configurable search engine and replace Lucene with it, or maybe try excluding that particular document from the results with a little JavaScript trickery in the SERPs decorator.

[Mick Davidson]

Matthew, thanks, I was hoping you wouldn'y say that, but it's what I thought. There ought to be a hide macro. :)

Cheers.

[Deividi Luvison]

We also have a feature request CONF-33161 raised to address that :).

[jaredleonmorgs]

I'm wondering if you could create an Archive parent at the Space root, and then apply either a group or individual permission to the tree that hides it from all Confluence users except a select few.

Surely pages that are hidden wouldn't be indexed by confluence, particularly if they didn't have any incoming links to them.

[RPT Admin]

If you're using the documentation theme and restricting searches to a single space, a workaround is available by creating the page as part of another space.

You could then use the Excerpt and Excerpt Include macros to import the whole page into your main space. It would still appear in the search results for all spaces - but not for the individual space.

[Mick Davidson]

Alex,

Good idea, but unfortunately that would make the process of creating and updating the content much more complicated, and we don't want to make it harder for users than it needs to be. It's a very neat idea though.

What I need is an 'Exclude from search' macro. :)

Cheers.

[R Donato]

This is an old post so you might know about this now. But there's a Visibility macro available where content on a page can be hidden and customized so that only specific people or groups can see it: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/net.customware.confluence.plugin.visibility