Why a product has multiple links and can show under different categories???

[sjbglx1]

most of my products urls are single ,unique categorized. they are not mapped, or moved to multiple categories, and all urls are using their original formats.

Does the original format has potential risk of duplicate contents? I want either control the "sources" which provides google those wrong urls, or declined wrong visit requests.

Please tell me how to do it.

[sjbglx1]

I have to use robot.txt to disallow those wrong urls to be visited , but still don't know how they generated

[mc12345678]

So it appears that you are reviewing the information made available by Google about the status of their site review and determination of items on the site.

Couple of things:
- it is possible to tell google what each of the parameters on the Web address do. Right now it looks like they are trying to figure out what it means to have different cPath values and how it relates to the overall site. Whether that information was obtained by internally determining a product in a category and then trying to see what is what or if someone at some point tried to promote the site by using very random links to point at the site. The thing though is that it appears that the cPath values appear to be those that exist.
- Ceon module was turned off instead of changing all of the active URIs to being inactive. As a result, now the site has to be completely reindexed rather than having the links updated back to their Zen Cart original paths by reference to their former rewritten uris.

From research of the original reported message it seems that at least in the data collection/attempt at accessing data that either the canonical link was not present or it possibly wasn't read. This could be an indication of how data about the site is being collected. E.g. One bot goes out and tries multiple variations, another reviews those results and cross references them with other information made available.

[barco57]

Just an observation when looking at the site page view source and a couple of tools including hitting the site with the Screaming Frog SEO Spider to try and see how the site looks to search engines. So using automated tools and my eyes I find something that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. In the menu below Categories" there is a sub--submenu that has display: none set on it but the urls appear to be wrong, the cPath= are empty

<ul class="sub-menu">
<li><a class="category-top" href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=index&amp;cPath=38">Anatomy | Biology</a>
<ul class="sub--sub-menu">
<li><a href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=&amp;products_id=8054">Test bank for Human Biology 14th Mader 9781259245749</a></li>
<li><a href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=&amp;products_id=8073">Instructor manual for Campbell Biology 11th Urry 9780134433691</a></li>
<li><a href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=&amp;products_id=8074">Instructor manual for Campbell Biology Concepts &amp; Connections 9th Taylor 9780134536255</a></li>
<li><a href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=&amp;products_id=8075">Instructor manual for Essentials of Biology 5th Mader 9781259660269</a></li>
<li><a href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=&amp;products_id=8076">Instructor manual for Essentials of the Living World 5th Johnson 9780078096945</a></li>
<li><a href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=&amp;products_id=8077">Instructor manual for Foundations In Microbiology 10th Talaro 9781259705212</a></li>
<li><a href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=&amp;products_id=8078">Instructor manual for Human Biology 14th Mader 9781259245749</a></li>
<li><a href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=&amp;products_id=8079">Instructor manual for Human Biology 15th Mader 9781259689796</a></li>
<li><a href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=&amp;products_id=8080">Instructor manual for Human Biology Concepts and Current Issues 8th Johnson 9780134312699</a></li>
<li><a href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=&amp;products_id=8081">Instructor manual for Inquiry Into Life 15th Mader 9781259426162</a></li>
<li><a href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=&amp;products_id=8082">Instructor manual for Microbiology A Systems Approach 4th Cowan 9780073402437</a></li>
<li><a href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=&amp;products_id=8083">Instructor manual for Microbiology A Systems Approach 5th Cowan 9781259706615</a></li>
<li><a href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=&amp;products_id=8084">Instructor manual for Microbiology with Diseases 5th Bauman 9780134608242</a></li>
<li><a href="https://solutiontestbank.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&amp;cPath=&amp;products_id=8085">Instructor manual for Nester's Microbiology 8th Anderson 9780073522593</a></li>

So you see in the above code the cPath= doesn't have an actual number for the category id. The question is whether or not that is causing the crawler to come back and test numbers in the url?

[sjbglx1]

Thank you for the thoughts. Could you please tell me how to have google to reindex my site?

[sjbglx1]

I'm using screaming frog to do the test but you pointed out the problem!

1. the links you digged out are not right ones and conflict with the product url and the canonical link in the header.
I have double checked and confirmed this. Which means, what bots saw are wrong ones. I think this is the main problem,
but can you tell me what caused this?

2. I don't know there is any sub--sub--menu, is that a sub category? but I don't have second level categories for sure.
It doesn't make any sense to me either.

Can you please tell me how to fix these?

[barco57]

They are being generated but hidden by CSS. You will probably need to have a conversation with Numinix who created your template about the problem.

[sjbglx1]

Also, can you please tell me in where I can find the code interface in screaming frog, sorry but I am new to this tool.
Please take a look at the crawl info, in the red area the links in bots eyes are all wrong and not indexable, I don't know how did it happen ,but the canonical link is correct though, see the pictures

[sjbglx1]

Thank you again!
so my question is :
in above screenshots I want bot to crawl a category: https://domain.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=38 and there is a 141 products in it.
however, beyond that number, it should automatically adjust the cpath number but instead, it finds wrong urls , how did this happen?
which files in zen cart control this ? do you have any idea?

[sjbglx1]

You are right!!
I activated other templates, and crawl again, no such a cpath problem anymore so the problem lies in my template,
probably its CSS file!