[HELP] Removing "/index.html" in search engines and some other sections

Hi guys. I decided to start pulling some serious local sites, and theferore i've started playing, for the first time, with google webmaster tools and all meta tags and etc.

I decided to make a quick search on google to check my first local website. It was indexed, but not as i expected.. i found out that it appeared as "domain.com/index.html", when my intention was to be like this "www.domain.com". Also there were some sections that i didn't want to be there too, like "domain.com/contactus.html"

So, what i did to fix that mistake was:

?Submited the website to google search console (webmaster) in both versions, www and non www, and verificated i was the owner.
♦After that, i set like preferred domain the www. version (using search console settings)
?Added robot meta tags with "index, no follow" so only main site appears on google
?Then i used tag "link rel canonical" in index.html file like this: <link rel="canonical" href="www.domain.com">
?Then i learned the concept of 301 redirects (kinda late, i know) and made it so the old "domain.com" redirects to "www.domain.com".

Now, my questions are these (i'd really appreciate if you answer everything since i'm focusing on local clients and i want to do things right):

1- with the meta robot tag i added to index.html, will google de-index the other sections that indexed before? (aka contactus.html , aboutus.html, etc), becouse i don't want them to appear on search engines, but it seems they already are.

2- how do i avoid getting indexed as "www.domain.com/index.html" when my objective is to appear as "www.domain.com"? I'm asking this question becouse, at first (when i didn't use any of the listed tools above), google decided to index my site as "domain.com/index.html" instead of "domain.com".

3- how much time does it take to reflect the changes? and does google take the job to crawl the site again and again in case i decide to add/remove content from index.html?

4- For my purposes, did i miss anything that could help it, or did i do too much, or it's fine?

5- The rel=canonical was a good move or was it unnecessary?



Thanks in advance

anyone knows anything about this?

I would wait with removing the domain.com/index.html tho, as sometimes it takes a while before google shows it correctly. As for the other links you can use the option you can see in the screenshot above.

Bladharkje said:

View attachment 68070

I would wait with removing the domain.com/index.html tho, as sometimes it takes a while before google shows it correctly. As for the other links you can use the option you can see in the screenshot above.

Click to expand...

Awesome, thank you very much. I already submitted the sections there, really appreciated.