Article has multiple URL's

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misterNo1
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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by misterNo1 » Thu May 03, 2012 8:04 pm

Can we use robots.txt to block the URl?
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bi ... wer=156449

For example
Disallow: /index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1275&Itemid=68

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by lowrykun » Thu May 03, 2012 8:17 pm

Yes. Sorry - that was the point of my last post.

In Google's robots.txt help, see the section on pattern matching.

You could add something like:

Disallow: /*Itemid*/ -which would prevent any page with an Itemid specified from being indexed.
-or-
Disallow: /*com_content*/ - which would prevent any page with com_content from being indexed.

I did this same fix this morning and will wait and see the results.

Alternatively, your example is using URL Parameters and can be filtered out in Webmaster Tools. Go to Site Configuration >> URL Parameters. You should see "option" and "Itemid" listed there. Press the edit button next to the parameter, click the 'Show example URLs button and see which URLs are being indexed with these parameters. If you don't want these indexed then select 'Yes: Changes reorders or narrows page content', 'Specifies' and 'No URLs'. Just be careful not to filter any pages you want. Personally I nixed the 'option' and 'Itemid' parameters.

My problem is that sub-categories are showing up under Category Blog items, so there are no URL parameters, but I've added some wildcards to my robots.txt to try and get rid of them.

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by misterNo1 » Thu May 03, 2012 11:33 pm

Thanks a lot for detailed instructions. You saved me a lot of time.
Will these settings affect the sitemap?Because Sitemap Contains the word 'option' ?
index.php?option=com_xmap&view..id=1

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by lowrykun » Fri May 04, 2012 1:34 pm

yes. If you use the URL parameters to remove all links with the word 'option' and the sitemap contains the 'option' parameter then it will remove the sitemap.

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by shockman » Fri May 04, 2012 2:02 pm

lowrykun wrote:Yes. Sorry - that was the point of my last post.

In Google's robots.txt help, see the section on pattern matching.

You could add something like:

Disallow: /*Itemid*/ -which would prevent any page with an Itemid specified from being indexed.
-or-
Disallow: /*com_content*/ - which would prevent any page with com_content from being indexed.

I did this same fix this morning and will wait and see the results.

Alternatively, your example is using URL Parameters and can be filtered out in Webmaster Tools. Go to Site Configuration >> URL Parameters. You should see "option" and "Itemid" listed there. Press the edit button next to the parameter, click the 'Show example URLs button and see which URLs are being indexed with these parameters. If you don't want these indexed then select 'Yes: Changes reorders or narrows page content', 'Specifies' and 'No URLs'. Just be careful not to filter any pages you want. Personally I nixed the 'option' and 'Itemid' parameters.

My problem is that sub-categories are showing up under Category Blog items, so there are no URL parameters, but I've added some wildcards to my robots.txt to try and get rid of them.
i just implemented your tip. how long does it take to take effect and deindex the pages? how will i know they are deindexed?

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by lowrykun » Fri May 04, 2012 2:10 pm

No idea. I just did it myself yesterday and am waiting on the results. It seems that Google re-indexes many sites daily. Smaller sites are probably less often. I did mine yesterday afternoon (MST) and I don't see any changes. I'll assume it takes a week or so. I'm hopeful, but if it doesn't work I won't be too surprised either - specifically because these are dynamic URLs, not actual URLs.

We'll see!

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by brunoalec » Fri May 04, 2012 2:20 pm

This looks as being a good band aid fix, but unfortunately for bigger sites thats receive content frequently is impossible this approach. Still looking for some real solution.
Bruno Alecrim
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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by lowrykun » Fri May 04, 2012 2:45 pm

I *think* I figured out a clue to what's happening

This is the link that I posted earlier...
http://www.alledia.com/blog/joomla-tips ... mla-sites/

While testing my search results I found the links that were causing my problems. The problem is that certain keywords are matching category names and these categories are being returned in results. The problem is that these categories are "empty" category containers that are used for site structure and only have subcategories, not articles in them. But they contain links to sub-categories. Without menu items, the links are being returned like this:

http://www.example.com/en/component/con ... upportmain (which are actually getting 404s)

But are somehow being indexed as

http://www.example.com/en/blog/64-all/supportmain

So the fix listed in the link above should fix my problem. However, it doesn't explain why these empty categories are being returned in results in the first place. In this case, perhaps its best to have these categories unpublished.

Long story short... I think I've confirmed that the bug described above was the source of my largest problems.

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by misterNo1 » Fri May 04, 2012 4:01 pm

@lowrykun,
will I have a problem if I removed sitemap?
How can I restore the 'option' settings?
I can leave 'itemid' settings,it will be enough..Thanks

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by lowrykun » Fri May 04, 2012 4:09 pm

If you used Webmaster Tools to remove the 'option' then you can add it back in there as well.

I probably wouldn't block your sitemap - even if you have submitted it to Google specifically.

Also - I'd check your XMap created sitemap carefully and make sure it was submitting the URLs that you really want sent.

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by kars » Mon May 07, 2012 3:06 am

I am having a similar problem with the menu item alias. URL's are being indexed via the category ID. Also, core joomla articles are being indexed under a K2 category ID and then redirecting to the homepage.

I saw a post at Joomlacode here: http://forge.joomla.org/gf/project/joom ... m_id=28478

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by dd5 » Fri May 18, 2012 9:14 am

I have similar problem. I upgraded from 1.5. to 2.5. with Jupgrade while back and noticed that my old url's were indexed also with categroy id's creating from original 200 url's to 600+ indexed url's, most of them like:
example.com/article_alias/category_alias_&_ID/menu_alias.

New urls added to the site since upgrade were indexed with only the original url, which is fine.
How to properly adress the issue for old url's, for which every article has 4-6 different url's?
I get lot's of warnings in GWT for duplicate meta desc. and menu titles, which is probably affecting negatively on seo and serp.

I've searched the forum, but no luck for proper solution.

Thanks

edit: as i googled for few hours, the possible solutions as i see are:
- htaccess 301 redirect of all generated url's towards original
- clean site map, containing only original url's
- gwt url removal request for all generated url's

Has anyone dealed with this successfully or could advice different effective tactique?

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by dd5 » Sun Jun 03, 2012 3:09 pm

Update:

Today i received a report from GWT that there are over 8k duplicate url's and meta/title tags and over 600 url's indexed on my site - all based on just 300 original url's i've created. I made example.com/menu_alias, but in serp i get all kind of _ID and category_alias url's, all pointing to same page.

How the heck can google index such amount of non-existing url's when i have my sitemap submitted with all my original url's, no backlinks pointing to generic one's and there are no other links except original on the site?

I don't know how to resolve this as it is a huge seo problem. I've checked 4 other sites and they all have the same problem with google indexing example.com/category_alias/menu_alias (and other alike url's) instead only example.com/menu_alias.

I would really appriciate if someone has dealed with this to share he's opinion/tutorial.
I've tried acesef, but doesn't help - it just screwes my component url's.

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by hanjimail » Thu Sep 06, 2012 2:27 am

dd5,

I have the same issue after Jupgrade 1.5 to 2.5.
Have you found any solutions yet?
Norito H.Yoshida, Yokohama, Japan
[email protected]
http://goyat.biz/

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by dd5 » Thu Sep 06, 2012 4:32 pm

I managed to avoid duplicate content (for now) but couldn't prevent creation of strange url's.
It also happened to me after jupgrade - i can't say it's jupgrade issue, but it started right after i used it for migration.

At begining i tried with sef components (sh404 and ace) but every day i got about 150 new url's generated, so i disabled sef components, enabled native Joomla sef and tackled the problem like this:

- i've blocked all url's that containg number's in them with robots.txt, which prevented url's with number to be indexed,
- in category's meta i disallowed indexing (robots="noindex,nofollow") which prevented url's with category in them to be indexed,
- bought rsseo for managing other pages and canonical url's to avoid dup.content,
- in gwt i've setup url parameters + sitemap,
- checked all the links on my site against any bad/non seo url's.

This recipe worked for me. Basicly url's on my site are still somehow generated, but not indexed, which helped with duplicate content and indexing url's, that were and are still generated.

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by rboersma » Mon Sep 10, 2012 8:09 am

Hi,

I posted a similar problem in http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=618&t=747007
. At least i think it is. I migrated to a new website. I have url rewrite set to enabled. When this is enabled, Joomla responds to urls like www.domain.com/dfbdwhcwfyufgrf/13. I wil now show the frontpage with article id 13 displayed.
The problem is that Googlebot keeps indexing old urls that have, accidently got an id in them that refers to an article on the new site. Now I could meaybe hack into the Joomla tables and change all article numbers to numbers that have never been used, but that's not a real solution.

@dd5, what line do you use in robots.txt to stop indexing url's that contain numbers?

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by hanjimail » Wed Sep 19, 2012 2:33 am

rboersma,

>Now I could meaybe hack into the Joomla tables and change all article numbers to numbers that have never been used,

Could you kindly give me the sql script to execute the above you mentioned?

At least that solves my issue for the time being.
Norito H.Yoshida, Yokohama, Japan
[email protected]
http://goyat.biz/

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by sbooder » Thu Oct 04, 2012 12:05 am

I am getting the "/component/content/?view=featured" listing which is rather annoying.

It would be nice to have a proper fix from joomla for this as client is not amused!

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by dirk80 » Sat Oct 27, 2012 4:58 am

Yes. I think we need a proper solution as Google takes duplicate content serious and downgrades my site. Is sombebody still following up to work on a solution?

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by adispalic » Tue Nov 06, 2012 10:31 am

Hi, anyone know why is Joomla suddenly making strange links, btw it didn't do that 5 days ago, before 01.11.2012:

This is one exemple where Joomla made it look strange:
http://www.radiatordesign.dk/index.php/ ... oldbodgade

links use to look like this & and thats what i have on other once i made 5 days ago, And if I try to type it like this it will not work?
http://www.radiatordesign.dk/index.php/ ... oldbodgade

BTW im using: Joomla! 2.5.7 Stable [ Ember ] 13-September-2012 14:00 GMT

Anyone have same problem that they fixed? Or know how to fix this, its just not working for me because suddenly some modules are showing in my article, and i dont want that, I want those modules to be showed only places i have put them to be showed, on category, AND yes that worked 5 days ago... I really dont know what to do now :( THIS IS REALLY MAKING MY WORK MUCH HARDER...

/BR

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by IDH-LA » Tue Nov 13, 2012 6:30 pm

@adispalic

I am having the exact same issue. Whenever I change the article to a different category, say, from the front page to archive, it retains the old link and then displays a ton of modules with the article at the bottom of the page. If anyone has a fix or any suggestions, this would be great. Dealing with a client with a ton of articles and can't afford to go through one by one. This is not a good look.

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by acarlo » Tue Nov 27, 2012 6:12 pm

Using robots.txt or rel=canonical is not realistic for larger sites, I have thousands of duplicate content pages in webmaster tools. This problem affects even joomla.org:

http://www.joomla.org/announcements/rel ... eased.html

http://www.joomla.org/announcements/rel ... eased.html

also the UN Regional Information Center:
http://www.unric.org/en/latest-un-buzz/ ... days-youth

http://www.unric.org/en/latest-un-buzz/ ... days-youth

Same article, different url, duplicate content. I believe that part of the problem is that our sites are being crawled by bots other than google such as malicious bots, and these are requesting urls that we do not use anywhere in our site.

Either way this is a problem with the core functionality of joomla, does anyone know if there is a bug related to this?

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by BodgeIT » Tue Dec 11, 2012 2:30 pm

I cannot believe this post has just died.
The issue is still outstanding.
Has there been any activity on this issue from Joomla Devs?

So far I think that this is the most effective solution:
dd5 wrote:I managed to avoid duplicate content (for now) but couldn't prevent creation of strange url's.
It also happened to me after jupgrade - i can't say it's jupgrade issue, but it started right after i used it for migration.

At begining i tried with sef components (sh404 and ace) but every day i got about 150 new url's generated, so i disabled sef components, enabled native Joomla sef and tackled the problem like this:

- i've blocked all url's that containg number's in them with robots.txt, which prevented url's with number to be indexed,
- in category's meta i disallowed indexing (robots="noindex,nofollow") which prevented url's with category in them to be indexed,
- bought rsseo for managing other pages and canonical url's to avoid dup.content,
- in gwt i've setup url parameters + sitemap,
- checked all the links on my site against any bad/non seo url's.

This recipe worked for me. Basicly url's on my site are still somehow generated, but not indexed, which helped with duplicate content and indexing url's, that were and are still generated.
Anyone have anything else to offer?

I use an app called ITPMeta which automatically creates metatags for urls. This can be used to add canonical tag for "the primary" url.
I also use it to add OG meta too. It does need a little refinement though.

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by Netmeister » Tue Dec 11, 2012 3:40 pm

Came looking for this problem again after first experiencing it back in April to see if there had been a fix. I'm amazed to see it is still ongoing given how it is affecting webmasters.

My solution was to actually remove any blog layout menu items altogether. Now every page on my site is 'single article' layout and simply hand written, so for my category pages that link to various different articles I just created the links and intro text myself to look like a category blog layout. Takes a bit more time when putting new content up but it guarantees I don't get all the extra indexed URLs showing in the search engines.

I appreciate this is pretty much impossible for bigger sites, but being as mine was only small at the time it was easy to implement it back then.

Hopefully they'll be a fix soon, otherwise I'll just continue my somewhat long winded method.

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by KRASH » Fri Dec 14, 2012 2:00 am

I'm forced to move one of my major sites to wordpress because of this issue. My site is still using 1.5. Will an upgrade to 2.5 stop the multiple urls for single articles?

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by benavip » Sat Dec 15, 2012 12:53 pm

I have the same problem.
Any guidance would be most useful.

Thanks
Please read the Forum rules regarding signatures: http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=65

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by JohnS3 » Mon Dec 17, 2012 3:19 am

Several months ago I learned of Joomla. I really liked what I saw and jumped in with both feet. I have been taking time to learn its details, investing in extensions, and spending many hours creating several important websites with it. I have been very happy.

I came to this forum a week ago to learn how to optimize my new joomla sites for search engines. My previous post asked that question http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=618&t=777168

What I'm reading has made my jaw hit the floor !!!! I now see my site randomly adding multiple URL's to eventlist articles. It seems from other posts the problem is wide spread.

Do I understand the situation correctly???? Joomla has a fundamentally flawed URL system that could kill search engine indexing? If that's the case, sorry to say we are all wasting our time until its fixed. Please tell me that my newbie perspective has this wrong.

I can't imagine fixing such a flawed system, by carefully editing noindex tags on each page or manually re-directing every bad URL it randomly generates. If google is seeing these errant URL's its too late, they have already affected index tables.

Is anyone on the development team looking at solutions?

Can some one who knows a ton more about Joomla than me, please explain this situation and is it as bad as it seems to me?

Dismayed,

-John

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by BodgeIT » Tue Dec 18, 2012 10:08 am

JohnS3 wrote:Several months ago I learned of Joomla. I really liked what I saw and jumped in with both feet. I have been taking time to learn its details, investing in extensions, and spending many hours creating several important websites with it. I have been very happy.

I came to this forum a week ago to learn how to optimize my new joomla sites for search engines. My previous post asked that question http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=618&t=777168

What I'm reading has made my jaw hit the floor !!!! I now see my site randomly adding multiple URL's to eventlist articles. It seems from other posts the problem is wide spread.

Do I understand the situation correctly???? Joomla has a fundamentally flawed URL system that could kill search engine indexing? If that's the case, sorry to say we are all wasting our time until its fixed. Please tell me that my newbie perspective has this wrong.

I can't imagine fixing such a flawed system, by carefully editing noindex tags on each page or manually re-directing every bad URL it randomly generates. If google is seeing these errant URL's its too late, they have already affected index tables.

Is anyone on the development team looking at solutions?

Can some one who knows a ton more about Joomla than me, please explain this situation and is it as bad as it seems to me?

Dismayed,

-John
Hi John,
While I understand your frustration, there is enough info in this post for you to be able to create a workable strategy to keep the issue in hand.
I agree that this does need to be looked at, but SEO itself is not a set and forget task.
It is something that needs to be monitored, adjusted and monitored again over time.
Building in some straight forward best practices for yourself and the sites you look after could actually be a good thing.

Merry Christmas All
Gary

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by lalili » Sat Jan 05, 2013 4:43 pm

I strongly agree with JohnS3 (John).
I'm also really frustrated with this condition. My site got more then 2,800 multiple URL's since move from 1.5 to 1,7 and now 2.5, while my site only have 287 article.
Now I'm not goind to looking for help here, there is no one of the joomla core team saw and give advice here so I think this is just a waste of time.
JohnS3 wrote:Several months ago I learned of Joomla. I really liked what I saw and jumped in with both feet. I have been taking time to learn its details, investing in extensions, and spending many hours creating several important websites with it. I have been very happy.

I came to this forum a week ago to learn how to optimize my new joomla sites for search engines. My previous post asked that question http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=618&t=777168

What I'm reading has made my jaw hit the floor !!!! I now see my site randomly adding multiple URL's to eventlist articles. It seems from other posts the problem is wide spread.

Do I understand the situation correctly???? Joomla has a fundamentally flawed URL system that could kill search engine indexing? If that's the case, sorry to say we are all wasting our time until its fixed. Please tell me that my newbie perspective has this wrong.

I can't imagine fixing such a flawed system, by carefully editing noindex tags on each page or manually re-directing every bad URL it randomly generates. If google is seeing these errant URL's its too late, they have already affected index tables.

Is anyone on the development team looking at solutions?

Can some one who knows a ton more about Joomla than me, please explain this situation and is it as bad as it seems to me?

Dismayed,

-John

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Re: Article has multiple URL's

Post by hatatitla » Sun Jan 13, 2013 7:44 pm

Ok,

please don't take me wrong but - is is really OK to have content accessible through the URL that should not have existed? NEVER?

please compare - e.g.

original:

Code: Select all

http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5471-joomla-3-0-2-released.html
versus:

Code: Select all

http://www.joomla.org/announcements/really-serious/5471-bullshit.html
You can change category, change article name... and you will not get 404?

Sorry, but it seems like a problem to me :(


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