Does Anybody have problem with Google indexing of knowledge articles?

[Marek Stepien]

We have been using ServiceNow for some time (almost a year) and we have huge difficulties to get our articles indexed in google This hurts our business since it depends on having articles findable in Google. Can somebody share their experiences with getting Knowledge articles into Google search?

Our SEO identified 5 defects (design defects) and two missing functions in the Service Portal making google indexing difficult, if not impossible.  Strangely enough all of the defects in Service Portal were fixed (or not available) in the old serviceNow UI called CMS (Content Management System).  The defects and missing functions are as follows:

1. Constant URL - the same URL should point to the published article through the article's lifetime.
   This is the biggest defect.
   In out-of-the-box SN instance, the URLs point to a specific version of an article, as
   https://<instance>/csm?id=kb_article&sys_id=3fd44b8d1be10c1483cb86e9cd4bcbbf
   If the article is republished, there is a new sys_id to the published article which require a new URL, and the previous URL is absolete since it tries to access an outdated version.

2. Title of the article added to the HTML source code.
   It is possible to get the 'Title' into HTLM code only if having sys_id in the title, which is problem #1.
   If fixing problem #1 (with our own implementation) by removing sys_id with KB#, adding 'Title' is impossible.

3. Description added in the HTML source code.
   Even if this is documented, and there is a configuration for it, the function does not work.

4. Canonical URL in the HTML source code
   Not possible to add Canonical link, and not possible to get a fix for it.

5. Consistency of internal links within the portal. The internal links should use the canonical links.
   The Articles should be referred through the system with the URL that we want google to index. 

6. Title of the article added to the URL
   The function improves drastically google rating.
   This is not a defect, rather the function is missing in ServiceNow
   The title of the article is added to the URL itself, as in this article found on the Web:
   https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/troubleshooting-technote
   where the title of the article is "Troubleshooting technote".

  
7. Sitemap
   ServiceNow does not provide Sitemap.
   We implemented it on our own.
  

[Marek Stepien]

Hi Amy, 
We made the changes to our instances four years ago, and now I see that most of the changes are in Out-of-the-box ServiceNow (Xanadu). Unfortunately we staying on our changes since converting them to the Out-of-the-box would be a rather big task. 
If you are on Xanadu, it would be difficult to advise you what needs to be done on Xanadu to get Google indexing. 

To get consistent and constant links, make sure that you always have the same canonical link for the pages. ServiceNow has the ability to show the same page via different portals (if you have more than one public portal, for example 'csm' and 'community'), different languages, different page dispatchers (kb_article, kb_category), etc. That is great, but this may kill google indexing if the page do not have a constant canonical link.
Another thing, if you have the DEV and TEST instances with public pages, make sure they are Disallowed in robots.txt. 
There are many issues that may impact google indexing. I suggest to monitor the indexing in Google Search Console, on the indexing page, in the 'Why pages aren’t indexed' section. 

I hope this helps, 
Marek

[dimple adlakha]

In Google search My kb article name does not displayed rather it displayed title for every article like "Knowledge Article" .

I want to display the name of kb article by short description or any other title field .

[k_lutz]

Has anyone had issues with Google finding inactive knowledge articles and how to stop it?

[Marek Stepien]

Do you mean articles that are Retired or the records of the kb_knowledge table with the Active field set to false? 

None of the above articles should be available at the public portal. Configure that the portal filter them out. Then Google will not see them. 

Another way would be to set 'nofollow' attribute for the articles that do not want Google to index, but the above is the better solution. 

Thanks,

Marek

[k_lutz]

Hello Marek,

The article has the active flag set to false and the workflow status to Retired. This is like version 2 of an article that is on version 5. A person found the posting which had older data and when they shared how they did it we saw the sys_id in the URL referencing the older document. When you mention filter them out of the portal. do you mean in the "Search sources?" This work of making things public was done before I was here; so trying to track down what may or may not have been done when making articles public.