Unexplained Crawl Diagnostic Errors & Opencart

[AsOneDesign]

Hi,

I've been looking at the crawl diagnostics for my site and trying to fix the errors that are showing up but Seomoz is producing some strange results.

It's saying pages are duplicated upto 16 times but those pages dont exist. It's adding "page=3", "page=4" to the end of the product URL but I don't see how it's finding those pages, nothing on the site(as far as I can tell) is linking to them. There is no "page=3", just the one product page.

Again on the duplicate content it's saying under the "other URLs" there's URLs like "http:///product-a" but again I don't see where it's finding these URLs and obviously those URL's dont work. Those three slashes aren't a typo either.

So far I've reduced the amount of errors from 2,005 to 543 but the rest of them I can't make sense of.

Also, what does one do when you have two products, eg: "product-a-white" and "product-a-black" to prevent Seomoz from seeing duplicates? Canonical links wont work because there's no parent item, just those two. Google Webmaster tools doesn't seem to have a problem though.

Using Opencart 1.5, if it helps.

Cheers,

[AsOneDesign]

Ah, so it may well be opencart doing something funky then. It's carrying the page url over into the product listing by the looks of it. I'll have to look into that then, thanks for pointing that out!

Do you have any idea how it could be finding the  "http://maggie" style links?

Cheers for the help,

[AlanMosley]

Ok, here is a example
http://www.lustrelingerie.com/Gracya-Lingerie/safari-wild-bra-push-up?page=5

linked from

http://www.lustrelingerie.com/Gracya-Lingerie?page=5

Seems like if the pages= is on the catalog page, it is on the product links

[AsOneDesign]

Hi Alan, thanks for the response.

Yea, sure there's additional pages for the categories, I'm talking about the individual products.

Take http://www.lustrelingerie.com/Bassaya-Lingerie/camila-red for example. Seomoz's Diagnostics is saying there's a http://www.lustrelingerie.com/Bassaya-Lingerie/camila-red?page=2. The latter works if you go there, I don't understand that and that's likely down to opencart, but what I don't get is how Seomoz is finding the link to it.

And it's the same with links such as "http://maggie" (real error), I don't see where Seomoz is finding the links to those. I've checked any stray canonical links but they seem fine to me.

Thanks,

[AlanMosley]

Yes they do exist

this page http://www.lustrelingerie.com/Everyday-Luxury-Underwear-Lingerie?page=1

is linked from this page

http://www.lustrelingerie.com/Everyday-Luxury-Underwear-Lingerie

There are many examples

[AsOneDesign]

The URL is http://www.lustrelingerie.com/

[AlanMosley]

If you can give us a url i will tell you for sure

[AsOneDesign]

Hi Ben, thanks for the response.

The thing is I don't think it's a CMS issue, it seems to me that seomoz is getting confused somewhere. my product pages are along the lines of "www.domain.com/range/product-a/". They have a canonical link pointing to "www.domain.com/product-a/" And all only have a single page to them. Which is why I can't figure out where Seomoz is picking up these duplicates.

With regards to your latter paragraph, yea I was thinking that. I thought it might confuse customers though, or I was hoping there would be a more elegant solution. Going back in and editing 500+ products isn't something I was looking forward to hehe.

Cheers,

[BenRWoodard]

I'll speak to the duplicates issue since the other appears to be a CMS issue and how it is displaying the products.  Whenever I see the "page=1" in the URL I can usually fink a pagination script that isn't helping my SEO efforts.  But I don't know for sure in your situation, especially since you said you don't see any links on the product page.

As far as the "duplicates" issue.  Try to get them as distinct as possible.  With our product pages (starting with the most sold items) I have begun changing up the product name. We have the difference of only the height on many of our products so I'm having to get a little creative and add some other aspect to the URL that stays within the products title.  I only want one page from my site competing for that exact match product SERP anyway.  It's not a good idea to have two pages on your site competing for the same SERP.  It seems to always be treated with less authority by Google when that happened in the past.