How to stop Archived spaces being indexed by Google

[Julie Bateman]

Hello

We are going to allow our vast Confluence help centre site to be indexed by the search engines.   We have some Archive spaces but don't want them indexed as its old content.

Will editing robots.txt No Index, No Follow on the top page be enough to stop Google and others indexing an Archived space?  

I note: 

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/archive-a-space-284368719.html

 Archiving a space has no effect on search results of external search engines. For example, a public space will still appear in Google search results.

But really wonder why it would be built in to allow something that's archived to be indexed? 

[Diego · Accepted solution]

Hello there!
As specified in our documentation Julie, even after archived a Space can come up in search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo. Since the indexing is not tied to Confluence itself, the application has no control on what the engines index.
We need to configure this manually using a robot.txt file. This should be enough to stop Google and the others from indexing your pages.

I could find documentation from Bing, Google and Yahoo on how to keep them from indexing pages via robots.txt. You can check them here Julie:

Bing - Robots Metatags

Bing - How Can I Get a Page on My Site Out of the Bing Index?

Google - Introduction to robots.txt

Google - Block search indexing with 'noindex'

Yahoo - Why is Slurp crawling my page?

Let us know if this helps you Julie. Looking forward to your reply.

[Julie Bateman]

Thank you so much Diego. I really appreciate it.  

Julie :)

[Diego]

Glad to hear that this helped you Julie! If you need anything else, do not hold back and come straight into the Community.

See you!

[Rodrigo Angulo]

@Diegowould a deleted space not show up in the google search results?