Referencing Content – Best Practices

Referencing content is valuable for many different reasons. As a content author, you avoid duplicating content if useful information is available elsewhere and you help your users discover other relevant or related content. Plus, it’s good for SEO.

On this page you will learn how to reference other content included your Scroll site using Confluence editor features and macros.

Display a List of Children on Topic Pages

Add the child items macro to parent pages to help your users overview the content of a specific topic. The help center theme (and some other themes) overrides the Confluence view of the macro to generate a nice, themed navigation element.

→ See a live example.

Display a List of Related Articles

Add the Confluence Filter by label macro (formerly content by label macro) to your pages to show and reference a list of related content from your Scroll site. Add it to the end of your pages to point your site visitors to the next most interesting or helpful pieces of content in the site.

→ See a live example (end of the page).

Link to Other Articles

Insert links to other articles

Select Link from the editor toolbar and use the search bar to find the right page in your space or document.

Inserting links via page search will ensure that they remain stable even if you rename or move pages around (as long as they remain in the same Confluence space or document).

Confluence will automatically transform your page link into its Smartlink inline view format and use the page title as the default link text. It’s a good idea to keep this default link text (or modify it slightly), so that it remains descriptive.

Why do my links show as URLs instead of the page title?

A link that shows the page title in the Confluence editor can publish as a long raw URL. The link still works. Only the text is wrong.

This happens because the Smartlink inline view stores no link text of its own. Confluence looks up the target page and draws its title each time the page renders. Scroll Sites does not render that view yet, so it falls back to displaying the link address instead. Scroll Sites resolves the link target separately, which is why visitors still land on the correct article.

To set link text that publishes reliably, replace the Smartlink with a plain link:

1. Paste the link into the Confluence editor.

2. Wait for Confluence to transform it into a Smartlink.

3. Open the link options dropdown and select Display URL.

4. Select the link again, then select Edit link.

5. Enter your link text.

The link loses its page icon, and its text no longer updates automatically when you rename the target page.

Insert links to article sections

Add links to article sections to help users skip to the relevant or related content right away.

To be able to link to specific sections, on the same or on another page in your site, you have two options, depending on where exactly you want the user to be navigated to.

• If you want to link a heading in your page, simply navigate to the heading and click the Copy link to heading icon that appears when hovering over your heading, then paste the link anywhere on that page or on a different page.

• If you want to link to any element in your page that is not formatted as a heading, you will need to place an anchor macro in the target section in Confluence first. Then, opt for one of the following options:

  • If the section is on the same page: Place anchor links (via the editor’s link option) in your Confluence page to link to the corresponding section of the page.

  • If the section is on another page: Manually build an anchor link to link to the section of the other page and place this link in your Confluence page. Links need to have the format https://yourname.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/space-name/pages/7453179996/Topic+Article#task1

Last updated: August 25, 2026