How to fix empty Itemid's like https://www.joomla.org/?Itemid=

Question

Google has indexed an URL on my site like this: https://www.joomla.org/?Itemid=

This results in strange page of course. Try it with your own site!

What would be the best way to redirect this to the Joomla default menu item?

Because Joomla's Redirect Manager did not work and a 301 in the htaccess neither...

My solution is this:

// Joomla System Trigger
public function onAfterRoute()
{
    // some basic checks
    if ($this->app->isSite() === false) return; 

    $app = JFactory::getApplication();
    $Itemid   = $app->input->getInt('Itemid');      

    // if an Itemid exists return
    if ($Itemid) return true;

    // get the default menu item id
    $menu = JFactory::getApplication()->getMenu();
    $menu_default = $menu->getDefault();
    $menu_default_id = $menu_default->id;

    // route it
    $link = 'index.php?Itemid=' . $menu_default_id;
    $link = JRoute::_($link);       

    // redirect to it
    $app->redirect($link, 'We had an empty Itemid.');
}   

But could / should this be handled differently?

The other methods I tried were as follows:

.htaccess

Redirect 301 /?Itemid= https://www.joomla.org/

And via the Redirect Manager:

The <jdoc:include type="component" /> is empty (of course). That is what I meant by strange. That's why I want it to redirect to the default menu item.

Btw. Google indexed the page (only) with the Google Links. e.g. Google Nieuws

See image.

It's not in my sitemap, not anywhere in the code / database. Screaming Frog SEO spidered it completely.

But ok, I asked Google to remove the URL. We'll see.

Answer 1

Yeah, I get all the search engines crawling URLs that have never existed on the site. It happens a lot, typically because they have that URL handed to them by some random site on the web. You can't control for that, and none of the search engines care very much about it, so that's a losing battle.

Some SEF extensions, such as sh404SEF, can handle that URL as an alias for a legitimate page, so if it bugs you, that may be one approach.

You should be able be able to use .htaccess, but I wouldn't use the syntax you posted as an example of what you tried. Apache's Redirect tends to take a greedy approach, so that example would also redirect, for example, ?Itemid=101 as well as ?Itemid=.

A better pattern would be like:

RedirectMatch "(.*)\?Itemid=$" "/whereever"

It will redirect every url that ends with that, and mod_rewrite might even be better. But, as with all .htaccess tries, this depends on the server config allowing these directives.

My temptation might be to consider that an "attack", and 403 it, rather than redirecting it. It wouldn't be the first time folks with bad intentions fed their links to search engines to have them locate new prey.

Answer 2

I have been able to recreate the issue on more of my sites and I think that you should report the issue as a Bug to the Joomla team to address rather than trying to create your own work around.

I don't profess to understand the details of what is going in here but the code in ../libraries/src/Router/ spends a lot of effort encoding, decoding and validating URI's so I think that someone who understands it could/should create a rule or check to handle an empty Itemid= on an incoming or outgoing URL.

Unless you can identify the code creating the empty Itemid= that Google is indexing I think this would be the best way to fix the issue for everyone.