We had several pages that were specifically named directly under the root of the website. For example, www.sample.com/sample-page.html. We just discovered today that some of the sef URLs had been changed to a generic name in a sub directory named for their section. For example: www.sample.com/sample-section/index.html and www.sample.com/sample-section/2.html.

Has anyone here experienced this? Does anyone have any idea what causes this and how it can be prevented?

Thank you,
Lisa

There may be several reasons for this:

1. The links were purged by accident
2. There exists more links pointing to the same content, each of them however contains different parameters and thus the SEO link gets duplicated.

Please, post both the original and SEO URLs here, so we can compare the differences. (both of the manually created one and the "generic" one)