Do search engines index your entire SITE when you give anonymous access to ONE SPACE?

[Sara B_]

I want to open one space to anonymous users, but not my entire site. By opening one space only, do search engines get the rights to index your entire site? Or do they only index the one space that you give anonymous access to?

Off the back of this documentation: 

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/make-a-space-public/

It doesn't seem clear to me whether search engines are able to index your entire space in this case or not.

[Tomislav Sablic]

Hello!

When you enable anonymous access for a specific Confluence space, only that space becomes publicly accessible, and search engines can index its content. The rest of your site remains restricted and is not indexed by search engines. You have to be sure you don't have more spaces publicly available.

[Sara B_]

Thanks for the answer @Tomislav Sablic - do you have any documentation that you could point me to that supports this? I need to convince stakeholders that the rest of our site will not be indexed by search engines - only the space we want to open publicly.

Thanks!!

[Kristian Klima]

Hi @Sara B_ 

A space without anonymous access enabled is simply not on the internet.

If space / Confluence privacy is a general concern among your stakeholders, there are apps that can make your selected content public even if spaces are private and not open to anonymous access.

This is exactly my use case in my company. We author and manage product documentation in Confluence - no space is public, we don't even allow public links.

But our documentation is publicly available - https://docs.emplifi.io/ 

We're using Scroll Viewport by K15t to generate static website from a totally private Confluence. This site is fully indexable (supports Google Analytics too) but nothing from your actual Confluence is ever exposed to indexing. You control what gets to the site - which space, or spaces, or selections of specific spaces. You can also use this as a workflow control - you only (re)generate the site when all your changes are done, so you won't be exposing drafts. (added bonus - you can also generate a site and put it behind your SSO - controlling access independently of Confluence user permissions).

Alternative app - Instant Websites by Glintech.

To my best knowledge, these are the only two apps that can create public websites from private Confluence (no anymous access needed).

[Kristian Klima]

Hi @Sara B_ 

Just adding to @Tomislav Sablic's answer, ensure to change the settings to allow your space to be discoverable.

See my answer to a related question:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/How-can-I-make-my-Confluence-site-searchable-in-search-engines/qaq-p/2943437#M334600

[Sara B_]

Thanks for highlighting this @Kristian Klima ! :) This is good to know