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Recently, i noticed that in my "google webmaster tools", Google indexes something like 500000 pages on my site, a site formed by more or less 300 pages.
What google indexes is the same pages with other "invented" values for the parameters (like "index.php?action=xe429rtn3" and so on).
The problem is that actually i think that Google sees them as a huge lot of duplicate content! How can that pages have been seen by Google and how i can fix it?
More details:

My site use Joomla 1.5 and the component "Zoo".
The indexes pages are not linked in any place in my website.

Thank you in advance

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Robots.txt

If all the problems are on index.php and it is not a page you actually need to have linked or indexed, put it in robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /index.php

Webmaster Tools Url Parameters Settings

If the problem is with a specific set of parameters like "action" that are not actually supposed to be crawled or indexed, tell Google about them in Webmaster Tools. Under "Configuration" -> "URL Parameters" set each of the parameters that you would like Googlebot to ignore to "Effect: none, Crawl: Representative URL" instead of letting Googlebot decide.

Canonical Meta Tag

There are plugins for Joomla that will set a canonical url for each page. A canonical tag on each page will tell Googlebot not to index the duplicate content and only index the correct or "canonical" url for each page. Here is one that I found by searching: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/url-canonicalization-/16198

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  • The problem is not that the parameter doen's have to be indexed, but that that parameter is being indexed with values that doesn't exist at all! Like "dmef3134" or "fo2r45".
    – Baronth
    Commented Feb 6, 2013 at 14:49
  • The using a plugin that puts in canonical meta tags sounds to me like your best bet.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Feb 6, 2013 at 15:08
  • I'm already using Sh404, that i think is what you mean as canonical meta tags plugin; isn't it?
    – Baronth
    Commented Feb 6, 2013 at 22:30
  • It looks like Sh404 does put canonical tags in, according to their feature list. You look at the source code of one of the pages that has the bad parameter values. Search in the source code for "canonical" and verify that the canonical url placed in the source code by this plugin is the correct one, without the bad parameters.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Feb 6, 2013 at 23:02

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