Joomla 1.5.14
JoomSEF 3.3.2

I have this strange behavior on my site. I have thousands of articles posted to my blog at interactiveonline.com/blog

"Blog" is the Section and the Categories you see in the module in the right column called Categories are Joomla Categories of the Section "Blog". I am not using any third party blog extension, just normal Joomla Section, Categories and Articles.

After I purge the SEF URLs from the JoomSEF control panel my SEF URLS no longer work... so the organic traffic I get from the search engines return FILE NOT FOUND.

The only way I have found to get the article(s) SEF URLs working is to go to the blog, click the category the article is in, filter to view the correct article and then click on it. Once I click on it it shows the article correctly. Also the traffic coming from the search engines can now see the article.

Something doesn't seem right about that. I shoudn't have to go click every article on my site everytime i purge the SEF URLs.

Here's an example which I didn’t search and click on the article yet

Title: What is Kunena?
URL: interactiveonline.com/joomla/what-is-kunena

Do I have to wait for the SEF URL extension to rewrite the URLs? I thought this was done instantaeously when the URL is accessed? Strange I have to click each one to get the SEF URLs working.

Any ideas?

Hello,
well this behaviour is quite logical.
JoomSEF generates the SEF URL for each link first time it finds it in HTML source code.

So, if you purge URLs and try to go to a SEF URL (which at the moment is not stored in DB), then logically you get 404 Page not found messsage. First JoomSEF needs to "see" the link to the content so it can regenerate the link again.

Basicaly, once you have your URLs generated and indexed!, you should not delete them! If you do so from any reason, it would be fine to make JoomSEF recreate them. This could be done quite simply using e.g. some sitemap component, so you do not need to click-thru your whole site manually to be sure all URLs will be recreated.

This behaviour of JoomSEF is intentional, because is simulates how both humans and search engine crawlers browse your website. They start on homepage (or already existing URL) and follow the internal links within. At that time, JoomSEF always creates SEF URLs for such internal links. This also make sure, that the DB with SEF URLs is growing continuously, so no resource heavy one-time regeneration is needed.

I do have a sitemap created using the Joomla extension Xmap at interactiveonline.com/sitemap

The Blog link is in the sitemap. If you go to the blog there is a Category Module that displays the Categories such as Joomla. It seems as if JoomSEF is not finding these links as you suggested having a sitemap would do.

Also you stated “JoomSEF generates the SEF URL for each link first time it finds it in HTML source code.”

Does this mean after I purge the SEF URLs JoomSEF starts to spider the site again and creates the SEF URLs?

Well it’s not doing this. In order to re-create the SEF URLs I need to click on the category in the blog and then click each article.

Google has already spidered my site and many articles are on page 1. The URL that Google listed for each article is the same URL JoomSEF re-creates once I click on the article within my site. Any external accesses to the SEF URL don’t work until I first click the internal link on my site.

Here’s another example which is listed in Google at www.google.pl/search?client=firefox-a&am...btnG=Szukaj+w+Google (5th result down). If the viewer clicks on my search result in google, it returns File Not Found on my site. The only way to get it to work right now is to go to BLOG > Joomla > Filter for article and then click on the article link.

Then when I go to google again at www.google.pl/search?client=firefox-a&am...btnG=Szukaj+w+Google and click on my search results the URL works just fine.

Something isn’t right here. Please advise. Thanks for your help!

As I wrote above, the JoomSEF is not spidering the web self, but it waits either for users or crawlers.
So, the first click directly from Google (just after you have purged all existing URLs) wull not work.
Anyway, you do not need to browse whole site to recreate the URLs. After purging URLs, it should be enough, to show the sitemap -- considering it contains link to all articles. Displaying the sitemap will renew all the URLs and restore them in database.

However, I repeat again, once the URL is created and indexed, you should not purge it unless you have a very good reason to do so.

ok well a sitemap is not going to list the 2,000+ articles I have on the site but I did find a workaround.

I just need to go to Blog > Joomla and then select Show All From the list which shows links to all articles in this category

This re-creates all of the SEF URLs for that particular category.

Thanks for your help!

Ok, that will also do.
However, for your SEO, it might be also good to have sitemap, that links to all your articles. With Xmap and when using com_content, this should not be a problem to achieve.