Moving a public subdomain behind a login without losing search equity
Response codes, removals, sitemaps and robots rules sequenced so the main site kept its authority while the help center went private.
- CLIENT
- B2B software company
- INDUSTRY
- Construction SaaS
- SERVICES
- SEO & AEO, Website Management
- YEAR
- 2026
What stood in the way.
The company wanted its support documentation available only to customers. The articles had been public for years, ranked for product queries, and were linked from across the marketing site.
Pulling them abruptly risked soft 404s, orphaned internal links and conflicting directives to search engine crawlers, which would waste crawl budget.
A deindexing project, done in order.
Inventory
Every help URL was cataloged with its traffic and its internal and external links.
Choose response codes
301s to marketing pages where a public equivalent existed, 410s where none did.
Sequence the cutover
Search Console removals, sitemap changes and robots.txt updates in the right order.
Fix and monitor
Internal links replaced before cutover, then coverage monitored in Search Console.
What was provided.
- URL inventory and response-code map
- Cutover sequence and checklist
- Internal link fix list
- Post-launch coverage monitoring
- Google Search Console
- XML sitemaps
- robots.txt
- Screaming Frog
Moving content behind a login is a deindexing project. The order of operations matters as much as the redirects.
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Tell me what you're working on and I'll come back with how I'd approach it.