Expose the content in Confluence to Google Search Engine
Asked by ZHI FONG TEO:

Hi there, how can I configure my confluence space content to expose under google search engine?

<br />

For example, I got an acticle "How to setup confluence space". When I enter the key work in google search engine, it should able to list down the article on the google search result.


Answers:
author: Shannon S
body: Hi there,

You would need to open up [Public Access](https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/setting-up-public-access-156.html) on your Confluence space in order for Google to index your pages.

Please be aware that once you open up Public Access, all of your spaces may be viewed by the general public. If you only want a specific space opened up, then once you open up Public Access as a whole on your site, you will want to go into each individual space that you do NOT want public access, and disable individually there.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,

Shannon

comments: author: Gary Strange
body: Hi Shannon,

95% of our confluence content is private and there is 5% that we would like to make public.

To clarify, I would need to create a new 'space' for public content and copy the 5% over to that public 'space'? Can this be done using exerts?

Also, you're saying that enabling public access, enables it for every 'space' on our account? and we have to manually disable it for each 'space' ? We have literally hundreds of 'spaces', this is not feasible for us. Do you have any other suggestions?

Thanks,

Gary


author: Shannon S
body: Hi Gary,

You would indeed need to open up public access on Confluence under your Global Permissions, per the previous article.

* [Make a Space Public](https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/make-a-space-public-829076202.html)

> In order to make a space public, your administrator must first turn on the global permission for anonymous access.
>
> This permission doesn't automatically grant anonymous users permission to see any of the content on your site, but it does need to be turned on to give space admins the option of granting anonymous users access to their space.

I've tested this on my own instance, and I can confirm that the individual spaces that already had permissions set didn't automatically grant anonymous users access, but you will want to double-check this on your instance. You can have a look at the default permissions to avoid new spaces created with anonymous access:

* [Assign Space Permissions](https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/assign-space-permissions-139460.html#AssignSpacePermissions-Assignspacepermissions)

> **To set the default space permissions:**
>
> 1. Go to ![](https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/files/747833194/747833195/2/1517274813281/cog.png) \> **General Configuration** \> **Space Permissions**.
>
> 2. Choose **Edit Permissions**.
>
> Default permissions are configurable for groups only, not for individual or anonymous users.

Let me know if you have any questions about that.

Regards,

Shannon


author: Mohit Shukla
body: I had all the permissions as specified above. These configurations exists for months now. Still, when I search for anything on google, I do not get my pages in the search results. These


author: Metin Savignano
body: [@Mohit Shukla](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4708197) Check <https://yoursite.atlassian.net/robots.txt>

In our case this returns a robots.txt file that forbids search engines to access any of our pages. Atlassian support says there's nothing that can be done, which I do not understand. So we have a wiki that cannot be indexed by search engines, which renders it virtually invisible.