What is External Sharing?

External Sharing is a frictionless way to share and communicate Project updates with customers and other stakeholders. Share a read-only public link to Project records with Partners and Customers with no need for login credentials. Precursive provides an alternative to External Sharing, Customer Workspace, that provides a secure space to collaborate with your customer. Learn more about External Sharing and Customer Workspace.with your customer.Learn more about External Sharing and Customer Workspace.

How to avoid your External Sharing pages showing in Google Search Results

If you use External Sharing on Precursive 2.0 or later then we recommend you follow the following steps to request that search engines do not index your External Sharing site.

1. Go to Setup > Digital Experiences > All Sites

2. From the List of Sites select Builder next to the External Sharing site

3. From Experience Builder go to Settings > Advanced > Edit Head Markup.

4. Paste the following: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

5. Publish the site.

Remove External Sharing Pages from Google

The first step should be to prevent your External Sharing site from appearing in Google Search Results using a noindex meta tag in your External Sharing site. If you have found your External Sharing site pages appearing in Google Search results then you can Request Removal from Google Search Console. Learn more about removing information on your website from Google.

How to check if your External Sharing pages are showing in Google Search Results?

Identify if your External Sharing site pages are included in Google Search results by performing spot checks for information using the site: search operator for your site.

For example search Google with the text site:precursive.my.site.com

Type this into Google to filter the Google Search results to only your External Sharing site domain. If you see results then follow the instructions below to remove External Sharing Pages from Google.

Add your External Sharing Site as a Property in Google Search Console

In order to request removal of URLs from Google Search results you must register with Google Search Console by adding a Property. Once registered as a Property you will be able to Request Removal from Google Search.

1. Navigate to Google Search Console

2. Select Add Property

3. Paste the URL of your External Sharing site into the “URL Prefix” option and select Continue
   
    

4. When prompted for Ownership verification choose the option “HTML Tag”

5. Copy the HTML Tag and navigate to Salesforce

   1. Go to Setup > Digital Experiences > All Sites

   2. From the List of Sites select Builder next to the External Sharing site

   3. From Experience Builder go to Settings > Advanced > Edit Head Markup.

   4. Paste the HTML tag into this section

   5. Then publish the Site

6. You should not be able to verify ownership of the property.

7. It may take a day or so for the Google Search Console to process all of your data for your site.

Request Removal from Google Search

Once you see information appearing in the Google Search Console for your External Sharing Site you will be able to request removal

1. From Google Search Console navigate to your Property then select Removals from the right hand menu
    

2. Select New Request , paste your External sharing URL and choose the option “Remove all URLs with this prefix”
    

3. Confirm the URL prefix you want to remove 
   
    

4. All URLs with this prefix, and all of their variations (www/non-www and http/https) will be blocked from Google Search for about six months. This request may take up to 24 hours. 

   1. NOTE: Although it says it will be blocked for 6 months if you also make the change to add the noindex meta tag to your site then it should not be indexed in the future.