Google penalties, duplicate pages, com_events and SEF Advance

[jayw]

One of my sites has been devastated by a duplicate page penalty that showed up in the Google algorithm update this weekend. 

My mistake - when I activated the Events Calendar I did not configure it to "not" display months, weeks or days that did not have an event scheduled.  The Googlebot indexed empty calendar event pages out until the year 3,500 (so basically I have over 80k duplicate pages). 

I deleted the Events Calendar component and now when I reference one of the event URLs, instead of getting a 404 error I am routed to a page that says:

The page you are trying to access does not exist.
Please select a page from the main menu.

This error processing is exacerbating the situation because now the 80k pages will be even more identical than before.

BTW I checked the status codes and its returning a 200 "ok" .

I need to return a 404 error when a page does not exist!


I’m using and have looked at SEF Advance but there does not appear to be a way to identify and fail URLs structured like:

Code: Select all

http://www.wakulla.com/index.php?option=com_events&task=view_detail&agid=213&year=2005&month=10&day=09&Itemid=38

Does anyone know if there is a way to build an .htaccess "RewriteCond / Rewriterule" that will generate a "404/fail" whenever someone accesses a URL for the com_events component (using the URL example above)?

Or

Is there a way to configure Mambo/Joomla so that it returns a 404-page not found when the page does not exist, instead of the internal error page?



Sorry if this is not written well. . I've been sleepless for three days watching the Google Jagger update decimate my SE rankings

Thanks,

-jay

[stace]

Your English is fine - and I feel for you! You've made me think a lot more about how careful one needs to be when configuring components!  Sorry I don't have an answer for you - I would try posting on some of the SEO forums related to Joomla.