Antwoord: Why Joomla 3 and Joomla 4 are potentially bad for your business / SEO, and what you can do about it.

Thanks Kimberley foor sharing your experience and steps: really helpful!
One of my customers who was hit with this issue had over 90K articles and 1.3K (nested) categories. Switching to the modern router was no option as it would kill his performance while doing the redirects.

I created a custom plugin for him to do a check on the URL (does the ID in the URL matc the alias of the article) and if the check failed produce a 410 (removed) response.
That way Google will clean up and more important when the fake URL (that are on some site) are indexed, these would not be re-added to the index as google would then automatically get the 410 whilie indexing.

This really hurt my customer business wise.

I created a free plugin (less custom work, more generic) that will do the same: ochStrictRouter. It builds upon the proposed change I did for Joomla 4 (and 3.9) that was not acted upon by the Joomla maintainers.
I hope it helps people facing this issue.

step 1 - PANIC - I was on a business trip when I got the google notification and did a google search and felt sick as all my links were to a foreign site - not porn thankfully, but just as bad, banking phishing pages
step 2 - as I didn't know what the issue was I changed the server and all the site passwords (31 sites on the server) and then looked at the specific site and tested each page to be sure the actual content wasn't compromised
step 3 - spent a full week manually requested a google delete of all 2200 links
step 4 - changed to modern routing and removed the ids
step 5 - added a sitemap plugin that let me see all the links / tags / meta etc on a single page

still feel a bit sick thinking about it - it was a major job that wasn't planned for at all.

Hi Kimberly, how did you 'fix' it?
I have proposed and developed a fix for core Joomla (J4), but the maintainers are still in 'denial' of this issue, so even for Joomla 4 tthis will not be 'fixed' unfortunately

thanks for this info - it's very helpful, it happened to one of my largest sites, it was a disaster

Hi, I run it.myself on a site with over 90k articles, no performance issues as what it does is a check on the url so no page generation / modification. It should also work on (externally) cached websites.

My advice is to only use this extension when you are facing the described bogus links: as a method to instruct searchengines to delete these links from the searchpages. First run it in dryrun mode and look at the produced log file if it 'redirects' correct. There are complex cases with articles in nested categories where not all categories have a menu assigned where this extension will fail.

Can I use ochStrictRouter on my blog truckercheckin.com on litespeed server and redis cache on top ? I got almost 50000 webpages on my website so redirect can completly slow down.