Yellow light, 'linked' categories, use only EasyPopulate

I'm running 1.3.9h, and EasyPopulate 1.2.5.4. (And Dual Pricing 1.8)

The site is built for client upload of product CVS, on a very frequent basis (a few times each day) and that part works fine.

What I don't understand, though, is why a handful of categories are showing up "linked," when absolutely no categories/products are created in the ZC admin. EVERY category, product, and image is mapped from the CVS upload in EasyPopulate. Obviously, across a few different listed companies we'd show identical products among "Widgets," for example, but I did not generate these identical products from a Master Category, thereby creating the link.

Again, the site works fine, no issues, other than this linked behavior which I believe is contrary to expected ZC function.

Since you're importing from multiple catalogs, there's a chance that one supplier placed a product in one category, the other supplier placed in another category and they both use the same model number which is what EP resides on. So, when importing, I believe you have something like this:

Supplier-1
v_model_number ... v_categories_name
123456 ... category-1

Supplier-2
v_model_number ... v_categories_name
123456 ... category-2

and this results in your linked products...