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I read back over what Rand posted over 5 years ago!  I have moved several sites and what Rand said is still best practice.  Google indexing is nothing to play with.  Taking down content and then trying to get it to rank again can look very spammy to Google.

Glad to help

I used Joomla long ago, so not sure how much help I'll be... But I'm 99% sure that Joomla does not do this inherently and if they did it would actually be a feed and not a duplicate page.  My guess is that you either have a plugin that is putting those pages there or there is something funky going on with a mod_rewrite. I'd also note that on your sitemap you can see that there are other duplicate page issues (yes, they even show up on your sitemap)...those pages with trailing slashes and without trailing slashes.  There may be a way to fix those with a joomla plugin or you can check out http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html on tips on how to overcome the trailing slash problem.

Carlos, Just wanted to say "Thanks" for this post. I am in a similar situation as Scott, and I had my doubts that a reconsideration request would yield any results. Nice to hear that it does. My "prior" seo advised me to wait it out. When I insisted, they wanted me to remove all reference to them in my response as well as remove their IDs in Webmaster Tools. Been trying to unwind things on my own before i submit a reconsideration. Do you think Google will remove the penalty if i just tell them I fired the SEO? Thanks again.