On our Joomla sites we get hidden pages/urls that appear to be just parts of other pages. I usually only find them after the sites live and do a site: Domain Name Registration and Web Hosting search in google. Does anyone get this and how do you solve it?

Are you using Joomla sh404 SEF component?  Because this component w...

At first glance it looked like you were describing a site hack, but I don't think that's it. I also have weird URLs showing up like this in Google for my J 2.5 site, despite those links leading to a 404 page. I believe it's a case of Google analyzing your site while it was in early development or crawling links that you're not thinking about. (A combination of both, in my case.) Worth noting - I use Joomla's built-in SEF, not sh404sef. Also worth noting: SEF is frickin' voodoo, and so is mod_rewrite. For example, this can happen if: You previously had Category names shown and linkable, but then disabled that after Google crawled it. Your site map plugin is crawling further than it should and reporting every conceivable link. You used a temporary menu to set up nav hierarchies before setting up SEF, and didn't secure the temporary menu to Special access. Two suggested solutions, one based on Googling and another based on my own experience: Clear the site cache and delete/recreate your menus. (Via Joomla Forum topic, http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?p=2805933#p2805933) Check your site for unpublished menus (menus which have no corresponding module) - SEF routing (whether driven by vanilla or component) respects menu entries if they are published even if the menu itself appears nowhere on the site. This is how a link can be legitimate without you meaning for it to be. Just remember, if you can get the erroneous URLs to serve 404s or 301s, they will disappear from Google.

Your website may have been compromised or there is an issue with SEF URLs or similar. 1. Try purging SEF URLs if you are using sh404SEF or similar and clearing and purging the Joomla cache and then recheck if the unexpected pages still exist. 2. Temporarily disable any SEF extensions and see if that helps. 3. If the problem URLs persist, it is probably a good idea to scan for malware. The best tool for scanning and repairing Joomla websites is probably the one recently introduced by Phil Taylor: http://myjoomla.com The myJoomla tool is not free but very reasonably priced.

This happens when any of extension used by is misusing your website. Possible Reasons : 1. You download any extension from pirate websites or torrents. They add malicious code into the extension and hence your website is compromised. 2. You are using at least one extension, which have know security problem (http://docs.joomla.org/Vulnerable_Extensions_List). Any hacker have used that security problem to get access to your website, and then installed his encrypted code to your website. When someone wish to spam website, he will install it in cryptic manner and would trigger spamming on certain variable presence. This is well known practice to keep spamming without getting noticed.