I've had this issue with some brand new Joomla websites. One of the first URLs Google indexes is www.yoursite.com/component/content/?view=featured.

In addition to a weird URL, following this link often opens your website without navigation or some other components. While this normally gets resolved after a while without any action (Google updates its index), as a temporary workaround you can use .htaccess file to redirect /component/content/?view=featured to your home page. Simply add flowing code to your .htaccess:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^view=featured$
RewriteRule ^component/content/$ http://www.yoursite.com/? [L,R=301]

If you want to add a separator between your Joomla home page featured articles, add following text to your template's Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) file:

.item-separator {
border-bottom: 1px dotted #898989; 
display: block; 
height:5px; 
margin: 10px 0; 
width: 100%;
}

Adjust parameters to match your website design.

By default Joomla sorts articles by title, which may be fine in some instances, however, most of the time people prefer to have them sorted by date with latest articles at the top. Normally, to do this you would have to click on Date heading twice.

There is no built-in option to change default sort order, but this can be achieved by making a small change to one Joomla core file.

Read more: Change default article sort order in Joomla back end

In some templates Joomla article navigation may appear in the middle bottom of your articles.

This can be changed by making a small change to your template's Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) file.

For example, if you use Rocket Theme Afterburner template all you need to do is add is folowing text to templates/rt_afterburner/css/light.css (actual css file name may be different if you changed template's colour scheme):

.pagenav-prev {float: left;}
.pagenav-next {float: right;}

With other templates, required changes may be slightly different.