Search engine visibility (e.g. Google)

Do you want your Foleon Doc to show up in search engine results or not? In this article, we’ll talk about how you can control the search engine visibility options of your Foleon Doc.

Foleon Docs and search engine visibility

Foleon Docs are optimized for search engines but are not crawled and indexed by default. This means that your content won't be publicly available in search engines unless you want it to be.

In the Foleon Doc Settings, in the Global Doc Settings tab, you will see the Search engine visibility toggle.

By default, this toggle is off (greyed out). With this setup, we block search engine crawlers from crawling its content and thus prevent the entire Foleon Doc from showing up on search engine result pages.

When search engine visibility is disabled, Foleon explicitly instructs search engines to ignore the Foleon Doc by adding three meta tags to the head of the Doc’s source code:

• <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />

• <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

• <meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />

This method aligns with the industry standard of hiding a web page from the rest of the web. For more technical information, we recommend reading Google's documentation on this topic.

Do you want your content to show in search engines? You can click the toggle on the right side, making it blue. This means that if you publish your Foleon Doc with this setting enabled, your content will be indexed by search engines (e.g. Google).

Preventing individual pages from showing up

It's also possible to prevent specific pages of your Foleon Doc from appearing in the search engine results. This might be useful when you want your Foleon Doc to be indexed by search engines, and thus publicly available, but certain pages are irrelevant.

In Settings > Page Settings, in the "SEO (Search Engine Optimization)" tab, you will see the Search engine visibility toggle.

By default, this toggle is on (blue). However, because the search engine visibility option in the Foleon Doc settings overrides this, we won't index your page. 

In the table below, we've summarized the different results with the search engine visibility (SEV) option in both the Doc settings and page settings:

Removing your Foleon content from Google’s search engine result pages

If you’ve accidentally published a private Foleon Doc with the "Search engine visibility" toggle on, you can prevent further issues by opening the Foleon Doc and navigating to Foleon Doc settings Marketing, switching off the toggle, and republishing your content.

However, search engines (like Google) will probably already have indexed your Foleon Doc which means it can still show up on search engine result pages. Only once your Foleon Doc is indexed again, search engines will see that it’s not supposed to be indexed and will remove it from its results. However, it can take a while before search engines refresh their indexing of your Foleon Doc.

You can speed this up by forcing Google to reindex the URL of your Foleon Doc. Google provides detailed documentation on how you can do this exactly. First, you will have to verify your site ownership, after which you can try to remove the property. Following the steps in these articles will help you to request the URL removal in Google.

In some cases, you might even need to set the Foleon Doc offline while the request is pending, so that Google thinks that the website does not exist, and you’ll need to republish the Foleon Doc after the removal request has been processed.

Read more about setting a Foleon Doc offline in our article About the Quick Actions menu.

How to ensure your Doc is visible on Google

By default, the search engine visibility toggle is switched off. This means we don't allow search engine crawlers to crawl your content — preventing the entire Foleon Doc from appearing on search engine result pages. 

If you've decided to toggle on search engine visibility and make your content public on search results, you might want to check if your content has been indexed yet. To do so, follow the steps below:

1. Double-check you toggled on search engine visibility
   If you haven't already, make sure to republish your content. It will take some time before your Doc shows in search results. It should be automatically indexed by Google, but to speed up the process, you can request indexing manually. Follow the next steps.
   
   
2. Double-check search results for your URL
   In your Google address bar, type "site:" and the full URL of your Foleon Doc, e.g., "site:ebook.example.com". If you get 0 search results, this means that Google hasn’t indexed your domain yet.
   
   
   
   
3. Follow the steps in the Google Search Console
   Go to the Google Search Console and follow the steps as described by Google in the domain property type. This is where you verify your site ownership. Ownership verification means proving to Search Console that you own a specific website.
   
   Verification allows you to see how Google is crawling and indexing your Foleon Doc so you can identify and fix any issues that may be affecting your visibility in search results.
   

   ⚠️ If you're hosting Docs on a Foleon domain, please contact support@foleon.com. Because we own the domain, we can start the verification process for you.