Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Yes, with a noindex tag in the theme, or by requiring sign-in. Both work; the question is whether you want to give up the readers who arrive from a search.
How do I keep search engines out?
Three routes, depending on how much you want to close off.
- A help centre that requires sign-in is not indexed at all. Search engines cannot sign in.
-
A public help centre takes a tag. In Knowledge admin, click Customize design, open the theme, click Edit code, select
document_head.hbs, add<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />and publish. - Individual articles restricted to a user segment are not indexed either, which is how you close off part of a help centre rather than all of it.
It will not happen today
Search engines index and unindex on their own schedule, and removal can take months. The robots.txt file is shared by every Zendesk account, so it is not yours to edit.
Should you?
Consider what you give up: a large share of help centre traffic arrives from a search engine, from people who did not know the help centre existed. Close that and only customers who already know where to look will find you.
When it is right
An internal help centre. Documentation for a product with named customers, where there is no public to reach. Content that would help a competitor more than your customers, which is a narrower category than it sounds.
The middle answer
Most organisations want a public help centre with restricted sections: public articles for the questions anyone might have, restricted ones for the detail only customers need. That keeps the reach and closes what matters, and it is what user segments are for.
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