SEO for public docs

Public docs only help if search engines can find them. The help center is built to be crawlable, fast, and metadata-complete — and authors control the per-article metadata.

How pages are served

• Server-rendered pages — help center pages are server-rendered for search engines, so crawlers get the complete article content on the first request.

• Fast delivery — readers see the published version of each article, delivered quickly; speed is part of ranking.

• Clean URLs — articles live at https://{subdomain}.helpin.center/articles/{article-slug} (or the same path on your custom domain, e.g. help.yourcompany.com/articles/{article-slug}), with stable slugs. Translated content adds a locale to the URL.

Per-article metadata

Set in the Docs publish panel per article:

• SEO title — falls back to the document title; keep it < 60 characters with the key phrase first.

• SEO description — the search snippet; falls back to excerpt.

• OG title, description, image, image alt — social/chat unfurls.

• ToC blocks render anchor links that can appear as jump links in search results.

Workspace-level SEO

The help center config also carries workspace-level SEO title/description and OG defaults used on the home page and as fallbacks for articles without their own metadata.

Structured data & discoverability

• Article pages emit standard meta/OG tags; breadcrumb-aware markup mirrors the visible breadcrumb.

• Public search pages are indexable; individual article pages carry canonical URLs so translated/fallback variants don't compete.

• Submit your help center sitemap (at your help center host) to search consoles after launch; redirects keep equity when slugs change.

Author checklist before publishing

1. Slug is short, lowercase, and describes the topic.

2. SEO title/description filled (or excerpt at minimum).

3. First heading states the question the article answers.

4. Images have captions (used as alt text fallback).

5. OG image set for articles likely to be shared.