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We're running into an issue where when we do an internal search on our website, we're not showing a particular page (http://education.illinois.edu/faculty/mercier). We're using the Google Search tool. Doing a Google search with "site:education.illinois.edu Emma Mercier" doesn't return the page.

What we've tried:

  1. Added the page to the sitemap and submitted the sitemap to Google Search Console.
  2. Entered the link to Google Search Console and asked to Fetch as Google. It got a 200. I then recrawled the page and waited 24 hours.
  3. Went to the robots.txt tester and entered the URL. It said it was allowed.
  4. Confirmed it wasn't part of the Blocked URL list.

I realize this is a generic question (with similar yet dated questions), but I'm stumped on what else to check. Thoughts?

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    You have done all you can at this point that I can think of. It takes a while for search engines to discover pages. It can take months sometimes. But your doing a Fetch as Google certainly will speed things up. Still, it can take weeks. I guess the next thing to do is to double-check the page to make sure the code is good and that it cannot or does not appear as spam.
    – closetnoc
    Jul 28, 2015 at 20:01

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Your issue is duplicate content. Specifically, there is another page on the internet with substantially the same biography: http://csteps.illinois.edu/dr-emma-mercier/

When Google sees the same biography on two different pages, it will choose only one of them to index.

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  • I didn't think of that -- thanks for pointing this out. It looks like the faculty member copied biography information on both sites, but our page has more information. Is there a way to appeal this decision? I looked at support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843, but there's no "Request Review" option?
    – bryanjonker
    Aug 3, 2015 at 15:04
  • Those decisions are made automatically by algorithms with no appeal process. The only thing that you can do is remove the duplicated text and replace it with something unique.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Aug 3, 2015 at 15:35

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