Clear old SEO content from Joomla

Question

Current situation

Our previous website was built to be embedded in Joomla, stuff like "About" were Joomla content, but the main page was custom PHP.

Now that we moved to a complete custom implementation I need to update the SEO stuff which was previously done by Joomla. I added the basic meta tags (robots, siteinfo, revisit-after, author, page-topic, description), a robots.txt and a sitemap (which I created after the Joomla one):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
    <url>
        <loc>https://www.domain.tld/</loc>
        <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
        <priority>1.0</priority>
    </url>

    <url>
        <loc>https://www.domain.tld/events.php</loc>
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
        <priority>0.8</priority>
    </url>

    <url>
        <loc>https://www.domain.tld/contact.php</loc>
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
        <priority>0.6</priority>
    </url>

    <url>
        <loc>https://www.domain.tld/about.php</loc>
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
        <priority>0.4</priority>
    </url>

    <url>
        <loc>https://www.domain.tld/tutorials.php</loc>
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
        <priority>0.2</priority>
    </url>

    <url>
        <loc>https://www.domain.tld/imprint.php</loc>
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
        <priority>0.1</priority>
    </url>
</urlset>

What I want

I'd like to display the pages given in the sitemap to be displayed just like when you search for Google:

What I get

Google still displays the old Joomla links:

Question

How would I achieve this? I added both my sitemap and robots to the Google Webmaster Tools and temporarily removed some Joomla links. Is there a way to completely purge everything that was already indexed about a page (I know that this sounds like a bad idea from the Google side, but I just don't see any other way to reset the current data)?

Answer 1

One, two or even a few months sometimes isn't enough time for Google to update its index with changes in a website and start displaying results in the way the website owner is desiring. And it's not only time what is needed, but thorough SEO work in all aspects.

Now, regarding Google showing main links pages for a certain website like in your screenshot, it is Google that will decide when to show this and on what kind of search. Website owners have less control of what links Google will decide to display there, but they can tell Google to remove certain links, if they don't want them to appear using Google's Webmasters Tools.

Answer 2

As per https://stackoverflow.com/a/15278642/1983389 it is probably better to submit a re-crawl request than trying to purge the existing data:

1. Go to: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and log in
2. If you haven't already, add and verify the site with the "Add a Site" button
3. Click on the site name for the one you want to manage
4. Click Crawl -> Fetch as Google
5. Optional: if you want to do a specific page only, type in the URL
6. Click Fetch
7. Click Submit to Index
8. Select either "URL" or "URL and its direct links"
9. Click OK and you're done.

It may take a few days before the request is completed.