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Hide external links from search engines
Hiding external links from search engines helps to discourage spammers from posting links on your instance. If you turn this option on, any URLs inserted in pages and comments will be given the 'nofollow' attribute, which prevents search engines from following them.
Shortcut links (e.g. CONF-2622@Jira) and internal links to other pages within Confluence Cloud are not tagged.
To hide external links from search engines:
If you aren’t already there, go to your Confluence Cloud instance.
Select the wheel icon () in the top-right corner to open Confluence administration.
Find Settings > Security in the left-hand navigation.
Select Security configuration.
Check the Hide External Links From Search Engines box.
Select Save at the bottom of the page.
Background to the nofollow attribute
As part of the effort to combat the spamming of wikis and blogs (Confluence Cloud serving in both capacities), Google came up with some markup that instructs search engines not to follow links. By removing the main benefit of wiki-spamming it's hoped that the practice will stop being cost-effective and eventually die out.
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