Google search does not show my website - sitemap

I already added two versions: one with www, and the other without www, both pointing to same location. I set the non-www as the preferred version. I add sitemap only to the non-www version. I added all the links in the sitemap. Then still my sitemap index status is Pending. I have an article that was current and relevant, but when I search for that keyword in google search, i ended already on the last search page, still my website doesn't appear. However those websites which are not even related to my search keyword appear. It's a bit frustrating cause I am confident my page is relevant and properly created, however Google still doesn't show it in the search results :(
Is there anything I still need to do?

It takes a couple of days for Google to crawl through and update the results after you make each change. Wait a couple of days and see what happens.

Related

Do I need to resubmit my sitemap after updating it?

I made some updates in my sitemap, when I first submitted it all the links are like this
http://www.www.bagreviewsguru.com/
and I changed it to
http://www.bagreviewsguru.com/
because there are warnings saying that urls are not accesible due to double www. So I need to resubmit it to Google Search Console?
It may speed up things according this blog post: http://www.lauradhamilton.com/resubmitting-your-sitemap-to-google. However, it's not something guaranteed.

Joomla: Hide categories in Google search results

We use Joomla 3.4.4 for our Company website. We have mod_rewrite and SEF-Urls.
In our company website, we use categories only to organize articles internally, not for public access.
Nevertheless, Google has somehow found out the categories and displays them in the search results. People clicking on these category search results land on a page with several articles, which is not intended.
How can I prevent Google from indexing the category pages?
I'll try to set the robots field in the category options to "noindex, follow". Hope this helps.
A quick workaround: Adding some RewriteRules in .htaccess. These redirect the unwanted category requests to the main page.
I scanned the whole google results and by now I have about 10 RewriteRules for unwanted URIs.
This was a major problem with our websites. Google searches would show several unwanted categories and include a number prefix (10-videos). Clicking the Google search would show a dozen various articles that were all marked noindex, nofollow. As the category itself was marked noindex, nofollow and the global default was noindex, nofollow, it was a complete mystery why this was happening.
After a several years of frustration, I finally solved it. There are two parts. A long-term permanent solution and a short-term temporary solution which will remove them from Google searches within 24 hours.
The long-term permanent solution is to disallow the categories in robots.txt. When the site is re-crawled, they should go away. Add the offending categories at the end of robots.txt. This will also take care of their sub-categories. These are case sensitive in Google so make sure to use only lower case. (Disallow: /10-videos)
The short-term 90 day solution is to manually remove the URLs in Google Search Console. This can currently only be done in the old version of GSC. It is not yet available in the new version.
In the new Search Console click Index : Coverage. Make sure the Valid tab is highlighted. At the bottom, click on “Indexed, not submitted in sitemap” to see the offending links.
In the old version go to Google Index : Remove URLs. Click Temporarily Hide. Enter just the category (10-videos) as it will automatically add the website link. This will also take care of their sub-categories. By the next day the bad URLs will be gone (for 90 days). These are case sensitive so make sure to use only lower case.

URL Re-writes and Google Indexing

I was asked to perform some URL re-writes for a new site with numerous dynamic pages and this has all worked fine.
However when I look at the URLs that Google has indexed, it has indexed the 'non-rewrite' url, so all the '?', '&' etc are being used.
What do you have to do to force Google to index your re-written URLs?
I just assumed it would do this automatically and never expected it to be an issue.
All help is gratefully appreciated.
Thanks.
Steps
1) Make sure that expired pages are no longer publicly accessible
2) Anything you do not wish Bots to crawl should be flagged with appropriate "nofollow" meta tags
3) Submit a new sitemap to your Google Web developer account
4) Make sure your Website throws a 404 error when a page isn't found. It is always a good idea to make a splash page for a 404 error which links back to your home page. (this is accomplished different ways across different server-side languages)
Google will automatically remove indexed pages if they no longer exist.. So be patient.

Google: Disabling the appliance-hosted search page?

Is there a way to disable or password-protect the search page hosted on a Google Mini appliance? I'm referring to the page descriped in option 1 here.
I basically want to prevent someone from stumbling onto this URL and searching here rather than through one of the actual sites using the appliance.
Try some of these:
delete the default front end
delete the default collection
set the Follow and Crawl URLs for the default collection to blank
edit the XSLT stylesheet under Serving > Front Ends > Output format.
My experience is with the Google Search Applicance, so I hope this works on the Mini too.

How to force a page to be removed from the search engine index?

Situation: Google has indexed a page in a forum. The thread is now deleted. How/whether can I make Google and other search engines to delete the cached copy? I doubt they would have anything against that since the linked page does not exist anymore and keeping the index updated and valid should be in their best interests.
Is this possible or do I have to wait months for an index update? Or will the page now stay there forever?
I am not the owner of the respective site so I can't change robots.txt for example. I would like to force the update as the "third party".
I also noticed that a new page on that resource I created two days ago is already in the cache. Given that can I make an estimate how long will it take for a non valid page on this domain to be dropped?
EDIT: So I did the test. It took google shortly under 2 months to drop the page. Quite a long time...
It's damn near impossible to get it removed - however replacing the page with entirely blank content will ensure that you nuke the ranking of the page when it is respidered.
You can't really make Google delete anything, except perhaps in extreme circumstances. You can adjust your robots.txt file to promote a revisit interval that might update things sooner, but if it is a low traffic site, you might not get a revisit very soon.
EDIT:
Since you are not the site-owner, you can modify the meta tags on the page with "revisit-after" tags as discussed here.
You cant make search engines to remove the link but don't worry soon the link will be removed as the link will not longer be active. You need not wait for months for this to happen.
If your site is registered with Google Webmaster, you can request to remove pages from the index. It works, I tried and used it in the past.
EDIT: Since you are not the owner, I am afraid that this solution would not work.

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