Google is indexing my inactive articles!

[SlickVick]

Has anyone here experienced this problem? I have articles that I will work on and then save. They are inactive since they're not complete, but google is still picking these up and they're being indexed.. Well, the problem with this is that once I finish the article and make it active so it publishes to my site, the url changes.. When inactive, the urls have _ and when active the urls have - in them.. So when google picks up an article and it's not yet published, google has it indexed as a url with _ in the string.. Once I publish it, the page goes live on my site, however the google link is broke because it leads to the wrong url.. So anybody that finds that article on google will not be able to view it because the google link takes them to a page that doesn't exist..

This is very frustrating.. I'm hoping someone here has enough experience to give me a hand with this..

[SlickVick]

I'm hoping someone can direct me to a file or a controller or something where i could prevent this from happening, or a way to prevent the url from changing like that..

Thanks a lot to anyone who can offer some insight.

[dave]

Hi,

Two things spring to mind, use a robots.txt file to control what Google indexes, or their own Webmaster tools. There are many articles on this.

Secondly you must be making the URLs of the incomplete articles available as links from elsewhere on your site, why don't you make these article only available through a login until they are complete/published. That way Google won't be able to find them.

HTH

Dave