Your event is personal, and who finds it online should be your call. If you've turned off search indexing and are wondering why your site still shows up in Google, you're in the right place. The change has been made on Joy's end; what happens next is in Google's hands, and this article explains what to expect.
How to turn off search indexing
From your Event Dashboard:
Click the Menu button (the hamburger icon in the top corner)
Select Event Settings
Click the Website tab
Toggle Allow my event to be found on Google etc. off under Search Privacy
What happens after you make the change
When you make this change, Joy notifies Google and other search engines right away. However, it's in their hands how soon they update. Typically, this process takes a few days to a few weeks.
It's also worth knowing that having this toggle turned off does not automatically mean your site will appear in search results. If your site was never indexed to begin with, it won't show up regardless of this setting.
As soon as you toggle off Allow my event to be found on Google etc., Joy adds a signal called an X-Robots-Tag header to your site. This is the standard way of telling Google and other search engines not to store your website in their catalog.
The catch is that search engines don't check every website in real time. They work through a process called indexing: starting from registered websites, following links from page to page, and cataloging every public page they find. Even with many computers running this process simultaneously, working through the entire public internet takes time. Google doesn't publish exactly how often they revisit any given page, and lower-traffic sites get re-crawled less frequently than popular ones.
To note, Google is not logged into any of the websites they are crawling, so a good amount of the internet is hidden from them. For example, most of Facebook is not indexed because you have to be logged into an account to see that content.
Until a search engine comes back around to re-crawl your site and picks up the new signal, your pages may still appear in results. The timeframe could be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and it will be different with each search engine and possibly each page of your Joy website.
Why your site might appear in search results at all
Joy event websites are not set to appear in search results by default. However, if the Allow my event to be found on Google etc. toggle was ever turned on, your site may have already been cataloged. It could also appear if another website has linked to yours, since search engines follow links to discover new pages.
Note: Turning off the toggle is not the same as making your site password-protected. If you want to restrict who can access your site entirely, visit your Website Privacy Settings.
If you need your site hidden urgently
Joy can manually submit a removal request to Google on your behalf. This doesn't bypass Google's process entirely, but it can help move things along faster than waiting for the next scheduled re-crawl. To submit this request, please reach out to our support team via chat or by emailing us at support@withjoy.com.
Still have some questions?
Ask us directly! Click on the black and white chat bubble in the bottom-right corner of this page to ask us your questions, or you can email us at support@withjoy.com. You'll get a friendly response from someone on our team! 🙂