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sh404SEF housekeeping and€“ shURLS

9539.png We turn our attention today to the question of shURLs. To quote Anythingdigital “shURLs — formerly called pageID — are tiny URLs automatically created by sh404SEF®. Their short length make them ideal for use in social networking sites or on print media such as business cards or promotional items.”

They seem to come preconfigured to be generated (at least we have no recollection of turning their generation on) by sh404SEF for certain Joomla components and we have observed the large number of ‘automatically’ created short URLS on our modest site.  We ourselves do not tend to use them, but what is interesting is the contents of these ‘short URLs’.  The vast majority were for subjects that have no relevance for our site what so ever and typically for subjects that would fall under the category of ‘SPAM’. They (most of the invalid/unrequired/unrelated ones) seem to be trying to ‘redirect’ or send email to external locations.

 

We have previously made reference to fighting the presence of SPAM on our site so were a little puzzled as to why there were so many of these shURLS relating to SPAM.  They could not be used, since the site refused access to enable their use, so have come to the conclusion the sh404SEF has ‘conveniently’ created these entries, ready for use, when attempts have been made to add SPAM to our site.  The fact that the SPAM creation attempt failed, somehow didn’t prevent sh404SEF from creating these short URLS links, probably either because the rejection happened after the shURL creation, or the short URL is created as a consequenceof someone trying to navigate to an invalid page and the short URL is created prior to the navigation attempt failing.

 

Since we do not use them it seems sensible to disable their creation.

To disable the creation of sh404SEF shURLs

1. In the Joomla backend, select Components > sh404SEF® > Control Panel Configuration tab > sh404SEF® Configuration.

2. Select the shURL tab and disable this feature.

3. Confirm your changes by selecting Save at the top-right.

This prevents sh404SEF shURLs automatically being created as each piece of content is viewed or crawled on the frontend of your the web site.

We are sure we are not the only site to have this behaviour so it might be well worth checking your own site if you use sh404SEF.

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