Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Yes, by requiring sign-in. That is a large decision, because indexing is most of what a public help centre is for.
The main lever
Restrict the help centre to signed-in users. Search engines cannot sign in, so nothing is indexed.
That is all or nothing at the help centre level. For individual articles, restricting them to a user segment has the same effect on those articles.
What you give up
Most of your readers. A large share of help centre traffic arrives from a search engine, from people who did not know your help centre existed.
Close that off and only customers who already know where to look will find your articles, at the moment they think to look.
When it is right
- An internal help centre. Obviously.
- Documentation for a product with named customers, where there is no public to reach.
- Content that would help a competitor more than your customers, though that is rarer than people assume.
The middle answer
Most organisations want a public help centre with some restricted sections. Public articles for the questions anyone might have, restricted ones for the detail that only customers need.
That gets the reach and keeps what matters private, and it is what user segments are for.
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