Creating new articles, suddenly a /2-uncategorised/ page is created with all these articles in a list

Question

I've added some articles to a joomla website. I copied exisiting articles and then changed the titles/text/links/meta. All the articles are in the category 'uncategorised'.

At first, the links were wrong. instead of, for example: /incassobureau-sint-niklaas, the link would show up as /2-uncategorised/27-incassobureau-sint-niklaas.

I fixed this by adding the new articles to the right menu. So now /incassobureau-sint-niklaas is working.

But the old (wrong) links are still online: /2-uncategorised/27-incassobureau-sint-niklaas.

When I crawl the site with screaming frog, this link doesn't appear, but it still works (it's not my cache, did ctrl F5).

There is also a new page http://www.aadb.be/2-uncategorised that shows all the articles beneath eachother on the same page.

Anyone knows how to get ride of these /2-uncategorised/ pages?

Answer 1

Check to see if you have your SEF URLs turned on and configuration correct. By default you should be able to access the URLs you listed, that is the default Joomla routing kicking in. 2-uncategorised is actually the category_id-category_name in the Joomla database. The default router uses these 2 pieces of info to create the url. Are you running any kind of SEF extensions on your site? That may be the cause as well if the extension has any cached values for URLs on your site.

Answer 2

Very good explanation why do we have "Duplicate Links" in Joomla, you can find here on JSE in
How to deal with Duplicated Content / URLs in Joomla?

It is hard to add anything more to this essay from @FFrewin, except that it is something we all have to learn how to live with if we are using Joomla, or any other CMS for that matter.