Your Joy website doesn't automatically appear on search engines like Google, but it might pop up if someone looks for your name or wedding-related terms. If you'd like to control this and make sure your site is hidden here's how.
Click on the Menu button (hamburger icon) on the admin dashboard.
Select "Event Settings."
Click the "Security & Privacy" tab.
Under "Search Privacy" toggle "Show my website on Google and other search engines" off.
When you make this change, we notify Google and other search engines. However, it's in their hands how soon they update. Typically, this process takes a few days to a few weeks.
Just a quick heads-up, having this toggle turned off doesn't mean your site will appear in a search.
For those that are brave, here’s some nitty-gritty information on how this works…
Search engines work using a process called indexing. For example, when you search for ‘wedding venue,’ Google knows what pages to show you because it has a database that connects the term ‘wedding venue’ with a list of relevant pages. Creating that database is called indexing. Google starts by looking at all the websites registered on the internet and goes to their homepages. It then follows any links from that home page, to other pages, and then follows any links on those other pages to other pages, and so on, and each time, it adds those pages to their database. Slowly it looks at every public page on the internet and adds them to their database. However viewing and cataloging every single public page on the internet still takes a long time. Google speeds up the process by having a lot of computers working on it all the time, but it can still take weeks.
(To note, Google is not logged into any of the websites that 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).
Furthermore, when something is changed anywhere on the internet, Google doesn’t know about it right away. Periodically they have to make additional rounds to re-index pages on the internet, to look for changes. Google also does not publish statistics on how often they look for changes, and they recheck higher trafficked sites more frequently than lower trafficked sites. Lots of factors go into how often each page is checked for updates, like usage statistics from Chrome or how often the website comes up in searches. With that said, it may take time before your Joy website is hidden from searches, (if it was previously searchable) as it may take time for Google to come back and re-index.
At Joy, we hide your website using a little note called a ‘X-Robots-Tag’ header that tells Google that this page should not be shown in searches. This is the standard way of telling Google, or any other search engine, to not store the website in their catalog. But, again, when you change your setting, Google does not immediately know that the setting has been changed until they re-index. They won’t add or remove your website from searches until the page gets re-cataloged during indexing. The time frame for this could take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to get indexed, and it will be different with each search engine, (and possibly each page of your Joy website). Hence, it could take a few days, or a few weeks, for your Joy website to be hidden.
If you would like to have your website hidden on a more urgent basis, we can manually submit a request to Google. 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! 🙂