Remove "Forgot your username?" and "Forgot your password?"

[matthewbaker]

When I search for my site on Google, the first two results that come up are the "Forgot your username?" and "Forgot your password?" pages. I didn't even know my site had these pages, as I am not allowing user registration and I have no need for user registration. How can I remove these pages from my site (and make Google show my site's home page as the first result instead)?

[AlexVega]

Hi there!

One posible solution is add the path for every page in robots.txt
you can find this file in the root folder of your site, use something
like:

Code: Select all

#Don't forget to review the correct names
Disallow: /password-reset
Disallow: /username-reminder

Cheers!

[matthewbaker]

Hi Alex, thanks for your reply. I checked out the default robots.txt supplied by Joomla and it disallows access to the /components/ directory, which is where the username and password pages are. Google is still listing those links on the first page when I search for my site. Should I specify the full path in robots.txt?

[AlexVega]

Hi there!

Yes, use the url path, in the example the full url are something like:

Code: Select all

#  yoursite.com/password-reset
Disallow: /password-reset

#  yoursite.com/username-reminder
Disallow: /username-reminder

Cheers!

[leolam]

Your site was indexed by Google when you installed Joomla and made the development. Just disable the user registration in User Manager which should be sufficient and should not lead to indexing by any search engine.

You can go to Wwebmaster Tools at Google and have theme re-index your site so these will be gone

@ Alex: Links depends if they were indexed with or without SEF enabled

Leo

[matthewbaker]

Great, I will have Google re-index the site. Thanks Leo!

[matthewbaker]

It's been a few weeks and I've had Google re-index the site. Now, unfortunately, the user login page at http://mydomain.com/component/users is showing up in search results, and I don't want it to because I don't have any users on my site. I'm going to try adding the following line to robots.txt:

Code: Select all

Disallow: /component/

Is there a way I can just permanently delete this page? I already disabled user registration so I thought this sort of thing wouldn't be an issue.

[AlexVega]

Hi,

By default, you should already have the line you mention, just check
the correct word:

Code: Select all

Disallow: /components/

See the default robots.txt in:
https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/bl ... s.txt.dist

Cheers!

@ Alex: Links depends if they were indexed with or without SEF enabled

Of course, I mentioned that is an example and he should use the url path:

Yes, use the url path, in the example the full url are something like...

[matthewbaker]

Hi Alex,

By default, you should already have the line you mention, just check
the correct word:

Code: Select all

Disallow: /components/

See the default robots.txt in:
https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/bl ... s.txt.dist

That line is already in my robots.txt. However, the URL that shows up on Google is mydomain.com/component/users and not /components/users.