Why is the exact same URL being seen as duplicate and showing an error in my SEO reports

[JoshMaxAmps]

Well, I am still having duplicate page issues.

I have a question about one of the errors SEO is giving me when I download a crawl report. I am going to attach a screen shot of part of the report so you can see for yourself, along with explaining it here.

SEO shows the list of URL's that it crawled in the report. In this(see attachment) portion of the report it has 321 results for the exact same URL. It also says all of these exact same URL's have received a 404 error. What I want to know is how does it make 321 results for the same URL? And with this error that I don't see when I look at the page?

0hkRDST

[jameskais]

Hey Josh,

You may want to speak with your developer on this one PHP is a server language and could be generating the unique pages and causing Roger to crawl twice depending on which way he approaches the page. I apologize for the delay here as I was not receiving notifications on this post.

[JoshMaxAmps]

I think it does so by PHP. Is there any easy way I can make sure?

[jameskais]

Hey Josh,

Rogerbot discovered this link through the /blog/ subfolder on your page which led him to the which battery post. By any chance does the auto forward do so by PHP or Javascript? Sometimes Roger can get a little hung up on these pages and think they don't exist.

Let me know either way so we can get this taken care of!

Thanks

[JoshMaxAmps]

Ok I get which page it is now but I do not understand the issue. There isnt a direct link to that blog post from any of the other pages crawled. And if you use either link they both work. The Column a link however does auto forward to the MaxAmps site equivalent page. Could it somehow have to do with this?

[jameskais]

Hey Josh,

This is James from Moz Help. I'd like to see if I can assist in diagnosing this problem. I had a chance to pull your crawl .CSV and the 321 pages you have in column F are actually the referring pages the actual page we crawled will be in Column A. Essentially the What Battery Can we MaxAmps Build for You has 321 unique pages it links too. While this page does not 404 it seems Roger can not get to the pages after this.

Feel free to follow up here or send us a message to help@moz.com

Have a great day!

[JoshMaxAmps]

Okay I will be sure to try and implement this to the blog.

You seem to know how a php dynamic site builds itself from one page. May I ask you another question? We have been going through this duplicate page problem for a long time. I generally get the answer to redirect or canonical the pages. I understand how I can do this to our blog as it is in word press. However, the rest of our site is not. The category section of our page, for instance, generates depending on how the person gets there from one single page of coding. And that is for all of our categories, not just one. How can I implement a redirect or canonical to this type of site. I would not want all of the categories to lead to one particular category. So if I put the canonical tag in my category page with a single url than that won't work. Also if I use a redirct in this page it will still lead me to only one category (correct?) instead of the people having the option to go to several different categories.

[donford]

Hi Josh,

By chance does this url have parameters. Those may not be reporting properly in this report. That would be my first thought. I have seen that frequently in blog / forum crawls, as those usually have many parameters for starting at a certain post number. The simple solution is to just rel canonical the page to its root.

As for the 404 error I would guess that some page is generated or linking to urls with certain parameters that the page itself doesn't know how to handle.