Joomla: Hide categories in Google search results

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.