[Cheryl]

I have a client who foolishly put all their support articles on Zendesk, and its now stealing half their organic traffic,

the site is using Cloudflare but we can’t redirect the subdomain to root domain seems Zendesk doesn’t support any customization at all.

https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408887013146-Why-doesn-t-the-CNAME-record-of-my-subdomain-propagate-with-CloudFlare-

[Judith]

the mistaken was using Zendesk to begin with, why does anyone use them? so many better options for support these days

[Donna]

mostly big companies use Zendesk for some API integration or some weird corporate reason they are catering to corps a lot

at least in USA they are catering to corp clients

[Ryan]

Zendesk doesn’t support any customization

Of course they don’t. Like so many American companies, their goal is monopolization and locking you into their system. They want to steal your organic traffic, they also are a Cloudflare enterprise partner so any Cloudflare features will be disabled on your Zendesk pages, same as Shopify.

Zendesk tells you to import all your blog articles and support FAQ and then screws you afterwards because you can’t do any 301 redirects or anything and lose control of your content.

Then you get tons of 404 errors and robots.txt crawling errors in your Google GSC. Fun stuff!!

[Hannah]

Zendesk are assholes, remember when they threatened to sue Zen Cache, a free WordPress plugin, for using the ancient “Zen” word in their name?

Stop supporting these corrupt assholes

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/zendesk-and-art-trademark-trolling

[Sophia]

they are catering to corps a lot

Kinda but not exactly. More like the same investors are behind company A and also company B, so during board meetings they steer contracts toward their other investments, often without the knowledge of others.

It’s just American style capitalism, freeeeeeedom

[Grace]

so how do I fix this lol

[Patricia]

In order to fix the Zendesk subdomain nightmare you have to delete the CNAME record in your Cloudflare, change to be “A” record and point IP address to your SlickStack server or dummy IP address like 1.2.3.4 and then use Page Rules in Cloudflare to setup wildcard redirect rule to wherever your support content is located now.

[Robert]

CNAME has limits anyways.

https://serverfault.com/questions/893711/cloudflare-redirects-and-cname

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/does-cloudflare-support-cname-redirect/59370

Zendesk just makes it even worse

[Ruth]

https://asadzulfahri.com/blog/4-reasons-why-zendesk-help-center-is-bad-for-seo/

Let’s discuss the reasons why your company should avoid using Zendesk if you’re serious about long-term SEO strategy. And before I begin, FYI, yes I have read https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/206401358-About-search-engine-optimization-SEO-in-Help-Center and it does not address any of the issues that we’re about to dive in.

TLDR; Zendesk is missing crucial feature sets that will negatively impact SEO performance and efforts:

[Jennifer]

insane

[Carl]

It’s actually even worse. Because if you delete or move your Zendesk subdomain and try to redirect it somewhere to fix your SEO, Zendesk has admin control over the DNS zone because of their partnership with Cloudflare. And of course they don’t tell you about this, you’ll just have hundreds of URLs suddenly redirect to:

https://www.zendesk.com/help-center-closed/

[Madison]

in other words they try to f**k over your SEO even more for having dared to stop using their Support system.

[Emily]

Never used Zendesk, problem solved 👍🏻

[Author]

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