This has been bothering me for a while now. I just launched a brand new site and note Google has indexed the wrong damn page. I've posted the issue on Anything Digital, but seeing how several of you probably use sh404SEF, you may well be interested in the situation.

Here's the post on their Forum...

Would you be using Joomla 1.6 and Xmap?

No, I haven't migrated to 1.6 yet. And I seem to be having great difficulty in explaining the problem of duplicate content to the global mod on the Anything Digital Forum....

The debate continues!

dev.anything-digital.com/Forum/sh404SEF/...-Domain-Name-alone./

Well Mate, I dunno if my experience and solution will be of help, but here goes:

I have a Joomla 1.6 site (still building) with Kunena and Xmap.

I had quite a bit of trouble understanding how to achieve the link in the main menu to the Kunena forum which has made the problem much worse, but you won't have had that problem.

There is a new version of Xmap for Joomla 1.6. I first had Beta2 followed by Beta3. They had a bug (well several bugs) that have been fixed in RC1, released a few days ago. Since installing the latest version of Xmap I've got on top of my troubles.

Xmap was giving all sorts of funny things in both sitemaps (xml and html). I thought it was something I had done wrong so played around with the menu type: Featured Article, Single Article, Category Blog, Category List with it's own nav. What a mess!

When I installed the RC1 Xmap, the sitemaps came right, I set up the menus as they should be and it all came right.

So I'm suggesting that you look at your menu types. I'm thinking it's not a SH404 problem. I don't have SH404 but was having the same problem.

domainDOTcom.au/component/content/article/14-bill-blogs-category/8-bill-trys-again
domainDOTcom.au/13-site-stuff/front-page
domainDOTcom.au/front-page

So I have a site with about 23 pages and 237 URLs indexed in Google (so they tell me). I'm working through the mess with the URL removal tool. I remove 30 or 40 URLs but the number still stays in the 230s so maybe there are a thousand URLs actually indexed.

Anyway, there it is for what it's worth.

Thanks for that Laurie. Interesting! It is not uncommon to find that Google has indexed far more pages than what your site holds and certainly sh404 may have something to do with it.

If you have sh404 set up to return category and title as URL, you will find a URL for the category alone in your list. But if you look at the number of hits on that page you will generally see that it is none. In that case I don't worry about it too much. But in reality you are right. If Google et al has far more pages indexed than what you have in your site, then you will no doubt have URLs indexed that are returning duplicate content.

Unfortunately I haven't heard further from Anything Digital since I told the respondent they didn't "get it". Perhaps they know a lot about SEFs and not that much about SEO. I sincerely hope that is not the case and someone will answer my post.

Aha!! Got some information via Twitter from Joel Krigsman in Melbourne who suggested I put the Redirect 301 in the first line of my .htaccess file to redirect the SEF URL to the primary domain. I had it at the bottom of my .htaccess file. It worked!!!!! I now have the sh404SEF URL for the home page being redirected to the primary URL instead of the SEF URL. Now Google will index the domain as the home page...

Forgot to post the closing results to this post.

With sh404SEF, anything that points to the home page needs to be added as an alias in Home Page Meta.

So if you set up a category (we'll ignore Sections now with 1.6 and K2) of Front Page, and then have an individual item on that front page entitled "Welcome To Our Site" (I hope you don't!) then you would have three URLs that point to the home page of the site.

yourdomain.com.au
yourdomain.com.au/front-page
yourdomain.com.au/front-page/welcome-to-our-site (you may have file extensions after these depending on setup)

You need to add the last two as aliases in your Home Page Meta and then they will be redirected to the domain name itself and Google et al won't think you have duplicate content on the site.

Cheers,