Possible queries:

How do I prevent my portal from being crawled?

Update sitemap for customer portal
Need help in updating meta information for SEO.

Resolution Path:


  • Sitemaps play a vital role in search engine optimization. They help search engines quickly crawl through pages resulting in better search engine rankings and customers can quickly find answers to queries that they have. 

  • We have an automatic sitemap generation feature, which will generate the sitemap for each account and store the XML here: http://.freshdesk.com/support/sitemap.xml. If you have a CNAME set up, please use that URL instead. Example: http://support..com/support/sitemap.xml.

    Note: The sitemap XML will be updated once a week (every Sunday). Any addition/deletion of articles will be reflected here. If you are on the Pro plan and above, the admin can proactively submit this sitemap URL to search engines such as Google and Bing to get the portal indexed.

    For more details, refer to this article.

  • If the customer would like to modify the meta information of articles, the SEO properties of every article can be filled. For Pro and higher plans, this meta information can be added to portal customization code as well. For more details refer to this article.

  • If the customer states that the portal is not getting indexed by search engines, there is a high chance that "noindex, nofollow" tag is present. This can be checked by viewing the page source of the article/portal.

    If the tag is present, it has to be checked on how it got added and removed:

    - > Check if the noindex, nofollow tag is present in the portal customization code (only in Pro and higher plans) either for the portal or just for the Solution articles as mentioned in this article. If it is the case, it has to be removed and published and the changes should reflect after the following Sunday. 

    - > Check the spam score of the account in Freshops. Our spam filter would check for any suspicious activity and add the noindex, nofollow tags with an increase in the spam score. If this is the case, we would have to whitelist the spam score and it could take about 1 week for the changes to reflect provided the spam score does not increase in between. Freshdesk automatically generates the sitemap and any update would get reflected on the Sunday's of the week.

  • If there are issues where the portal/page is being listed in search despite:
    -> adding noindex, nofollow tag in robots.txt through portal customization
    -> deleting the portal/article
    -> disabling the product portal

    We would have to check if the robots.txt file has the tag, if the sitemap has been updated with latest changes (it can be validated with L2 team for clarification). Post this, we would have to wait until the new sitemap gets updated after the following Sunday. If the page is still showing up, we would have to reach out to Google support to remove cached URLs from indexing. Here is an older link where such requests can be raised, and has the updated links for further requests.

  • If there are issues with incorrect name, incorrect results, after the above checks are performed, an L2 ticket can be raised to have it clarified further. In most cases, if the details are as expected at our end, we would have to raise a feedback with Google for having it fixed. Sample ticket : https://support.freshdesk.com/a/tickets/14913504 (for reference).