I believe the problem here is being caused by the fact that you are using relative, rather than absolute URLs for your canonical tag. I've seen this happen before on a site I was working on.  Thanks to awesome suggestions from Moz Q & A from community member George Andrews (endorsed by Dr. Pete Meyers), we updated all of our canonical tags to be absolute URLs instead of relative URLs. This completely solved the exact problem you are describing.

Here's a link to that thread: http://moz.com/community/q/what-is-the-proper-syntax-for-rel-canonical

The best news is, it's a very easy, inexpensive and quick SEO win. I love those!

Dana

Hi All! What constitutes a normal crawl rate for daily bingbot server requests for large sites? Are any of you noticing spikes in Bingbot crawl activity?

I did find a "mildly" useful thread at Black Hat World containing this quote: "The reason BingBot seems to be terrorizing your site is because of your site's architecture; it has to be misaligned. If you are like most people, you paid no attention to setting up your website to avoid this glitch. In the article referenced by Oxonbeef, the author's issue was that he was engaging in dynamic linking, which pretty much put the BingBot in a constant loop.

You may have the same type or similar issue particularly if you set up a WP blog without setting the parameters for noindex from the get go."

However, my gut instinct says this isn't it and that it's more likely that someone or something is spoofing bingbot.

I'd love to hear what you guys think!

Dana

Hi again Bob,

Take a look at this thread on how to remove query strings from static parameters...I believe your answer is there.

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-remove-query-strings-from-static-resources

Dana

P.S. Why is this a problem for SEO? A couple of reasons:

1. It's highly likely your content will get shared without the query parameter AND with the query parameter. This will effectively split your link equity between two versions of the same page.

2.Google Search Console is very bad at understanding that the page without the query string is the same as it is with the query string...you'll likely get a lot of duplicate content notifications.

3. From an end-user standpoint, it's just plain ugly....and end user experience matters to SEO right? - I understand that's somewhat facetious....but it's your business right? You want it to look a good, solid, high-quality, professional site. Ugly query parameters scream "I hired my 21 year old nephew to b build me a WordPress site."