Why are these pages duplicates when canonical is defined?

[designquotes]

The SEOmoz reports indicate that the following pages are duplicates even though the canonical tag has been added.

http://www.designquotes.com.au/dq/web/get-quotes/quotes

http://www.designquotes.com.au/dq/web/get-quotes/brief

Is this normal?

[mad2k]

Hi Daniel,

This is you have the same content for different url's. Default state of the form - form not filled - always redirect to first part no matter what url you type. REL canonical doesn't help in such a situation.

Try after cookie cleaning:

http://www.designquotes.com.au/dq/web/get-quotes/brief

http://www.designquotes.com.au/dq/web/get-quotes/contact

http://www.designquotes.com.au/dq/web/get-quotes/quotes

I think you should use js or ajax scripts and display all parts of the form on one page (URL). Think 'toggle' will be good for it.

Marek

[AgentsofValue]

I guess my question would be why do you have two completely different url paths, returning the same content?  Generally, canonical is used to catch things like, www vs non www, trailing slashes, caps vs no caps in the urls, # signs in urls, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_normalization

My guess is that it's probably a bug on the part of the SEOMoz software, and that Google would probably respect your canonical tag here.  Just to be safe, you might block the second url in your Robots.txt file.