Hello all,
After reading few threads it looks like few other people have had the same issue but there was no conclusion in any of them. So, here is my issue;
I have a k2 2.6.8 based website on Joomla version 3 with around 200 pages and it is growing. all the links in the frontend works fine but google webmaster as well as Joomla Redirect plugin shows 600+ auto generated k2 urls with 404 or 500 errors and they all look like this:
www.domain.com/parent menu/childe menu/itemlist/tag/duplicated address

my menu structure is:
parent menu(no link) / child (k2 item)

and I have a hidden menu for all k2 parent categories

I have around 70, 301 redirects in .htaccess and joomla sef is enabled. I attached k2 sef settings.
and I dont have sh404sef or any other 3rd party sef extensions. (I am not sure if sh404sef is already included with core k2!)
Where is itemlist/tag in the URLs coming from and is there any way to stop the generation of this type of urls?
Or even better can these urls be fixed?
Or whatever alternative solution any one can think of





I'd appreciate any help since my google ranking is already affected.

Any input would be much appreciated...

Hi. These seems to be the tags URLs. If you don't have a lot of tags, try to create menu links for them. This should solve the problem. However the URLs should be www.domain.com/parent menu/childe menu/itemlist/tag/TAGNAME. If there is no tag name in the URL then you need to check all your K2 overrides as well as all third-party K2 related extensions you might have.

Thank you for reply,

That is exactly why I am confused! The tag URLs like www.site.com/menu/childe/tag/TAGNAME.html or www.site.com/hiddenmenu/tag/TAGNAME.html work fine so I dont think making tag menu is needed in my case. In fact all the links in fronend seems to work and an actual user won't have any broken link experience but Google webmaster and Joomla redirect plugin shows all sorts of crazy urls that don't visibly exist such as:
www.site.com/menu/childe/itemlist/tag/ایمی گلوب .html(which i suspect is tag name without unicode)
www.site.com/menu/childe/itemlist/tag/NOTHING!(and sometimes just a charterer of tag name like "ب")
And the worst is this
www.site.com/menu/childe/itemlist/tag/index.php/menu/childmenu or a random k2 item
and there are other variations but I think you got the idea!

I build this website with a pre-loaded template with joomla 3 and k2 and bunch of items and menus already in it. I have been working on it on the xampp (localhost) and I transferred to online server with akeeba. I have done some overrides but mainly css template stuff. the site did not have this issue when it was offline on the xampp (joomls redirect plugin didnt show that much broken urls) . I have not installed any extension that directly was related to k2 after the transfer (I installed xmap, mailchimp plugin and user transfer extension) but I did turn on Joomlas sef feature as well as k2s sef feature after the transfer.

Sorry for the long comment, just wanted to give you some info to work with. I really appreciate your time.

The Joomla! redirect component just shows there requests to your server that gave a 404 error. This does not mean that your site has broken links. This seems to me like a spam attack since older versions of K2 would display a page even if the tag in the URL didn't exists. Since you have updated to latest K2 version such pages should return a 404 error. I don't think you should worry. The only thing you need to check again is that there are no broken links in your site.

I now understood the list of urls shown in the redirect plugin and thanks for that, but is google webmaster works the same? I cleared google webmaster lists and after 2 days I have 33 urls with 500 error, and 1100 urls with 404. Could you please write couple of lines elaborating on the spam theory you had and possibly suggest me a solution to fix it or prevent further issues?

Thanks again,

No. Google webmaster does not work like that as far as i know. You need to check your whole site for broken links. The spam theory ( regarding K2 part of your site ) should not worry since it has been fixed already in the past. Is there a link to your site so we can take a look?

and couple of screen shots of the site's google webmaster error report. so far there are 33 505s and close to 1300 404s.

Thanks as always,

Just to give you an update, Google webmaster 404 crawl error has been consistently increasing and so far it shows around 1900 non-found 404 urls. as I mentioned all the real visible links on the frontend work. Odd and frustrating! Looking forward to hear from you.

Thanks

When you say all the real visible links you need to know that Google indexes also links that you have hide with CSS. So you need to check the HTML markup and not what you see on the browser. Also note that the 500 error does not indicate a broken link. It indicates that the page is not loading due to a server error. This might be caused by server load or by extensions using bad queries etc.