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We are using Joomla 1.7 and Joomlart template, with t3.

The URL's appear to be working, except that it appears to create additional urls with a number - for example the url:

http://www.hamlethub.com/danbury-entertainment/cat/arts-entertainment/8385-food-for-thought-an-evening-of-nibbling-a-networking-hosted-by-the-womens-business-council

is the article. However if you add a -2, or dash any number, after danbury-entertainment, it still works. There is only one article, and I don't know how it is getting that url. you can try:

http://www.hamlethub.com/danbury-entertainment-6/cat/arts-entertainment/8385-food-for-thought-an-evening-of-nibbling-a-networking-hosted-by-the-womens-business-council
and replace the -6 with any number.

The reason this is important is because for some reason Google is picking up the article with the -2, which will mess up the template.

Can you tell me why this is happening?

Thanks

same here....
help please

I would recommend to install AceSEF and make nice URLs http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions ... /sef/10019

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I do not think that works. I am using no article list or blog views, but google indexes e.g. the page

http://www.bk-nettdesign.de/webdesign-s ... /webdesign

This page does NOT EVEN EXIST (there are not subcategories for "webdesign-seo-preisliste-guenstig) - and returns an empty page. The 11- can be changed to any number, I do not get a 404 but always the same empty page.

Or for

http://www.bk-nettdesign.de/13-leistung ... s-marsberg

I get a category blog view, which is not linked anywhere on my page. By changing the number (13) I get totally different category-blog-views with articles not related to one of the categories "webdesign" or "webdesign-aus-marsberg", but which belong to subcategories of "leistungen".

So, I do have tons of duplicate meta-descripiton and meta-title tags in google webmaster tools.

I am not quiete sure, but I think this happend after migrating vom 1.7.3 to 2.5.1 or by starting to use Smart-Search.
Since I am not using any category related menu items, I have set all categories to "noindex, nofollow", but it will take some time, until google recognizes...

Any other solution??

Here also... I am beging to believe this is a joomla problem, because even if you take a look at other websites even from professional SEO companies thats use joomla, they also have similar problemas regarding duplicate content, just take a look in one example:

http://www.ijoomla.com/news/

http://www.ijoomla.com/news?start=30

I hope I am wrong. But I unfortunately beging to believe joomla is not a good alternative when you consider serious SEO development.

_________________
Bruno Alecrim
Rio - Belem - Brasil
http://www.unicasite.com

FWIW, I am not using Smart-Search, and I am still using 1.7.3, and I am experiencing this problem, although for me it puts the number in a different place.

The major problem fol me is not that I can address content by using these URLs, but that google is able to fetch and index them, although they are not used anywhere on my website

You could 301 redirect all the pages or make canonical tags for these pages...

_________________
I provide Joomla! site building and technical help at http://www.mainostoimisto.eu

Same problem here. How can i redirect or make canonical tags for pages that i haven't even made? Those pages are automatically generated, you can't edit them.

For example http://www.domainname.com/contact is found by Google two ways, which have different layout:

http://www.domainname.com/contact
http://www.domainname.com/contact/2-uncategorised

Of course the first one is real site, second one has list view and some other articles in it too!

Same here. Every article now has duplicate content with the following URL format:

www.domainname.com/2-uncategorised/etc

I haven't created a category or blog homepage, but somehow Google was able to find these URLs which I never knew existed in the first place. I can't see where Google is finding the link to these pages.

It's frankly and unholy mess. Does anyone know what the issue is here?

Same problem here. Lot's of duplicated urls (1000+) found in Google Webmaster Tools.

1) Without .html extension, with .html extension.

site/article.html
site.article

2) Same article listed under multiple categories.

site/news/article
site/news/latest/article

In the above example, I just moved the orignial article to another category(/news/latest/). Now Joomla keeps the obsolete article url as well and Google indexes both urls.

I really hope there's a real solution to solve these problems.

I have a simular problem, in Joomla 2.5. An article that is part of category blog page also shows as a independent search result in Google, with a number http://cecileaandestegge.nl/4-gekkenwerk. The lay-out is incorrect, as it is styled with a class depending on the menu-link.
I never had this issue before and would welcome a solution for this.
It could also be caused by a new way in which Google browses Joomla site?

_________________
http://www.tastymouse.com/]tastymouse.com

I just saw the same today. Luckily I don't have that many URL's so I will just start to redirect them with sh404SEF.

_________________
http://www.tinocordes.com or http://www.tinocordes.dk

How can you redirect an existing page? I know you can redirect nonexistent old pages in Joomla, but how about site that exist?

You should check for duplicated pages using Google Webmaster Tools. I bet many Joomla users will experience the same problem. I just guess many don't know.

Same here, I only have 175 article on the site, but Google Webmasters reports give me 1.348 and all it got 404 error.
Happen with joomla, im using joomla since 1,0, 1,5 till now 2.5.3, the problem comes since joomla 1.7

These are not always duplicate pages, but automatically generated pages with different layouts, they might consist of lists of categories, lists of articles, featured pages etc. and with different layouts. So i think this is a serious problem.
(You can't edit these pages since they are automatically generated by Joomla.)

Agree with tinamaria.
Its serious problem who want make the site SEF.
This is make me really crazy, i don't why joomla 2.5 going crazy take url that i'v never made

had anyone got a solution to this as I am having the same problem?

I believe I'm seeing the same issue, with articles & category blogs showing up in Google in places where they're not defined to be.

Some simple experimentation shows that you can enter any category hierarchy and display any article. For example:

The article is supposed to be here: /news/latest/34_articlename
I can access it using any valid category name, eg: /about/who/34_articlename

Is this really how it's supposed to work?! I never noticed this in Joomla 1.5.

Advice welcome. I don't want to have to start using a 3rd party SEF tool.

Where is the Joomla team on this obviously widespread and serious problem.

In my case Webamaster Tools led me to find this problem.

I'm getting dupes for articles in the following manner:
http://www.mysite.com/category/subcategory/34567.html << WRONG
and
http://www.mysite.com/category/subcategory/34567-article-title.html << CORRECT

I'm using Joomla 2.5.4, SEF enabled and no 3rd party SEF component.

Any guidance would be most useful.

Thanks

this is happening to me too!lots of urls are getting indexed that i never created. these urls are showing up before the real urls!

it just seems to take snippets of information from pages and list them on the page. some have More Articles or Subcategories at the bottom.

what gives!

Does anyone has any answer regarding this issue ? Is this a joomla bug ?

_________________
Bruno Alecrim
Rio - Belem - Brasil
http://www.unicasite.com

I believe that I can explain the problem a little more concisely. Please feel free to correct me if I've misunderstood the inner workings of Joomla.

A typical Joomla article URLs would require some parameters:
* Itemid - the ID of the menu item to use
* catid - the ID of the category
* id - The ID of the article
* lang - the two letter sef code for the language

So a typical NON SEF URL might look like this:

index.php?view=article&Itemid=123&lang=en&catid=456&id=789

Internally, Joomla always uses this URL. Typically we would use the JRoute method to pass these URL and create a SEF URL. When you use the SEF functions, then it's making the URL pretty, but still passing Joomla the same information.

So if you have a URL that looks like this:

http://www.example.com/en/menu/456-cate ... ticle-Name

Then it's really just grabbing the parameters (looking up Itemid from /menu/, lang=en, catid=456, id=789) and passing them to Joomla, then dumping the other stuff.

So really you could pass the a fake or incorrect URL like this and it would work the same to Joomla.

http://www.example.com/en/othermenu/456 ... ticle-name

In other words, Joomla doesn't care what the words say as long a it can get the ID parameters out of the URL. So anyone in this thread that's reporting that they passed a different URL name to a page that shouldn't exist and it comes up... thats just how it works. More importantly, that's how it's supposed to work. So anyone above that reported that error... sorry. I think you're SOL.

THE PROBLEM:

The real problem (IMHO) is that Googlebot is somehow indexing pages that shouldn't exist for links that were never created.

So in the bottom example:
http://www.example.com/en/othermenu/456 ... ticle-name

The problem is that these articles all exist in /menu/, but for whatever reason are also showing up in /othermenu/ - but we don't know why. Because of the way Joomla SEF works, these are seen as valid links and are rendered - only the page is being shown with the wrong menu item (with the wrong modules and wrong template).

In looking through every page of my site, I cannot ever find a link to these items, yet they are showing up in Google webmaster tools as being indexed. I personally believe that it's a problem with the category blogs with linked titles turned on. It's somehow finding and linking all articles under a category that they shouldn't be in.

Let's keep thinking about it and digging and we'll come up with solution!

Not that I'm massively up on the inner workings of Joomla, I too believe it's something to do with the blog layouts. Looking at my sitemap, all of the 'extra' indexed URLs are coming from my blog layout pages.

One thing that I did notice that might help you smarter folk diagnose the problem is that the extra URLs are being picked up from the articles in the blog layout page that DO NOT use intros. For example one of my category blog pages is laid out line this:

- Full article
- Full article
- Intro and link to full article
- Intro and link to full article
- Intro and link to full article
- Intro and link to full article

It's only the two full articles that are having these ghost URLs indexed in Google and on my sitemap.

Worst case scenario, what I'll do is just change the layout to single article and code the page myself while the site is still fairly small. Will take longer, but will be more SEF.

Interesting... Let me think on that.

The linked titles are the second part of the problem. The linked titles in category blogs are showing relative to the Itemid (menu) that is calling them. So the linked titles is what Google is actually indexing.

The main part of the problem is where and why Googlebot is finding the links to the wrong Itemid's (menus).

On my site, I'm seeing the problem where I have a category blog that shows all articles (full articles, no read mores). It's then adding the parent category (of the category I'm in) and all the sub-categories. Then the linked titles to the articles in those all show up. I'm seeing a lot of pagination as well.

My category blog is: /en/blog

This category blog *ONLY* contains articles - no subcategories!

Blog is a sub-category of All (category 44).
I have articles showing up like described above, but I'm getting links like below also showing up in webmaster tools (this is just a small sample, I have 1000's). Check out 195 (reseller-bios) showing up as 195-all, and 196 (corporate-pages) showing up as 196-all, etc... None of these links should exist.
/en/blog/195-all/reseller-bios
/en/blog/196-all/corporate-pages/193-press-contacts
/en/blog/196-all/corporate-pages/197-subscribe-to-news
/en/blog/196-all/terms
/en/blog/44-all?start=24
/en/blog/44-all?start=36
/en/blog/44-all?start=48
/en/blog/44-all?start=60
/en/blog/44-all?start=72
/en/blog/44-all?start=84
/en/blog/44-all?start=96
/en/blog/64-all/en/faq
/en/blog/64-all/supportmain?start=12
/en/blog/64-all/supportmain?start=24
/en/blog/64-all/supportmain?start=36
/en/blog/64-all/supportmain?start=48
/en/blog/64-all/supportmain?start=60

Also...

I'm not sure if it is related, but Google has indexed my homepage as it's root domain, but also the following links, both of which show my home page content but in a screwed up order and fashion.

site.com/component/content/?view=featured&start=5
site.com/component/content/?view=featured

I don't know if this is the same problem. joomla is automatically made ​​copies of some of my pages. For examle
my page: examle.com/page.html
joomla copy: example.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1275&Itemid=68

Of course, I can not access to the duplicated pages,so I don't know how to make a redirection..Can someone help me..?

I have the same problem. I think this a high priority bug which should be fixed asap.

Can anybody tell us if the Joomla development team is looking at this problem!?

I'm wondering if we are experiencing a variation of this, but to a greater degree:
http://www.alledia.com/blog/joomla-tips ... mla-sites/

Also - read this for more background:
http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/20 ... -goes-bad/

It appears that the solution is to monitor pages that are created in Google Webmaster Tools, then use your robots.txt to exclude the pages.

I still feel that this is a band-aid solution and not a full fix. Just thought I'd pass it along to see if it worked for anyone.