20 000 duplicates in Moz crawl due to Joomla URL parameters. How to fix?

[Xmanic]

We have a problem of massive duplicate content in Joomla. Here is an example of the "base" URL: http://www.binary-options.biz/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html

For some reason Joomla creates many versions of this URL, for example:

http://www.binary-options.biz/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html

or

http://www.binary-options.biz/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html

So it lists the URL parameter ?q= and then repeats part of the beforegoing URL. This leads to tens of thousands duplicate pages in our content heavy site.

Any ideas how to fix this? Thanks so much!

[csfarnsworth]

Surely your URL structure is not fine.Can you please try this fix and update me?

http://docs.joomla.org/Enabling_Search_Engine_Friendly_(SEF)_URLs_on_Apache

[Milian]

These are caused by the links to your language pages.  If you click one of the language links from within the source code (not on the page) it redirects to a URL with '?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html' added. Then if you click the same language link on that page it again redirects to another page with previous URL added to the end:
?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html.

e.g:

On the example page view source, search for German and click the link below:

http://de.binary-options.biz/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html

This link 301 redirects too:

http://www.binary-options.biz/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html Then if you view source, search for German and click the link again:

http://de.binary-options.biz/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html

This link 301 redirects too:

http://www.binary-options.biz/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html?q=/index.php/Web-Pages/binary-options-platforms.html

So basically every time a web crawler follows a language link, new URLs are being created with the previous URL added to the end, causing a never ending crawl as an infinite amount of new pages will always be created.

I don't think this is connected with the Joomla SEF as Chris pointed out, as your URLs are already SEF.

However it's not an easy thing to identify how to fix the issue with the language links. You should probably speak to the developer who implemented it and/or the creator of the plugin if it is a plugin.

Also do you even need this functionality? As none of the language links work, they just redirect back the main site.