By default, the core Joomla search component will return search results that include categories, archived articles, and potentially other results that you don’t want listed. Search results can be refined by disabling and configuring Search plugins. For example, in the Plugin Manager, you can disable the Search – Categories plugin. Within the Search – Content plugin, you can turn off Archived Articles.

Chapter 1 – Google

My good friend Leroy was performing SEO on a website and discovered a couple dozen pages that produced 500 pages that Google did not like. The URLs for these pages had a common similarity in that ?format=feed&type=atom or ?format=feed&type=rss were appended to them. Some were legitimate URLs that would serve up perfectly well-formed HTML pages if you eliminated the format and type parameters at the end of the URL. Others would serve up 404 pages if the parameters were removed. Time to investigate.

As part of ongoing work with SEO for a website I built, Google was complaining about 500 errors on pages such as:

http://[domain]/[page]?format=feed&type=atom

In order to turn off the automatic RSS Atom feeds, follow these steps:

When using the Joomla! Update component to update from 2.5.19 to 3.2.3, the update failed with the following error: