Multiple URL's exist for the same page, canonicaliazation issue?
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All of the following URL's take me to the same page on my site:
1. www.mysite.com/category1/subcategory.aspx
2. www.mysite.com/subcategory.aspx
3. www.mysite.com/category1/category1/category1/subcategory.aspx
All of those pages are canonicalized to #1, so is that okay?
I was told the following my a company trying to make our sitemap: "the site's platform dynamically creates URLs that resolve as 200 and should be 404. This is a huge spider trap for any search engine and will make them wary of crawling the site."
What would I need to do to fix this?
Thanks!
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As long as you have the canonical in place you should be fine on the duplicate content aspect. In terms of the "spider trap" I dont really agree with their logic but the idea holds true. These pages would not be a spider trap as the spiders would be able to continue to navigate through your site as there are links on these pages. You should however only include the pages you want indexed in your xml sitemap. Also, you could try and 301 redirect these pages to the canonical version.
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