Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It's a site/server setting issue. Basically, web crawlers don't store cookies, and in order to keep a session alive between the client and server, a cookie is needed. So servers usually redirect the cookieless user to the same page, but will add some kind of unique id in the url in order to track the user and avoid seeing the same user as a new user each time it opens a new page. (in asp.net, this could create a new profile each page a crawler opens) In your case, it looks like cookieless user are redirect to a specific error page, thus warning users that they probably need to enable cookies.. In your site or server settings (ie web.config in asp.net) you can prevent the server to redirect cookieless users. You can also write a function that disable the cookieless redirect for robots only.

Thats my fear.  So that leaves my 5 301s to what is now the same page - so 5 old links now link to the same content.  Does not that make the old links show up as duplicate content?

If these problems are occured due to product category parameters here solution Cross check results with:  **site:mydomain.com inurl:product  ** If you wanted to block a category parameter from being crawled it might also be useful to have them organized into separate directories.If you wanted to send a spider like Screaming Frog or Gsite Crawler through a section of the site to create segmented sitemaps so you can see which major parts of the site are having indexation problems. it would be much easier to do so if there was a directory you could ask it to crawl down from. **Rel next / prev or View All Canonical - **Fine for pagination when used correctly but won’t solve most faceted navigation issues. Rel Canonical - Helps with same facets in different order (e.g. blue/small/cheap Vs small/cheap/blue) But not designed for different facets (e.g. blue/small/cheap Vs blue/medium/cheap)

Per Svanstrom, This is a great way of thinking of it and you answer makes a lot of sense to me. In case someone finds this later looking for Magento Category advice - what you see in many magento seo posts is to not use categories in the path due poor native canonical handling especially when products end up in multiple category paths.  It seems a lot better plan to follow the functionality advice of Per's post and just fix  the canonical problems in the design or by adding an extension.

I checked and it is a magento feature to rewrite caps to lower case. I added this to htaccess anyway <code>RewriteMap lc int:tolower RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} [A-Z] RewriteRule (.*) ${lc:$1} [R=301,L]</code> One last question before I take this question to a magento forum - how can I look at a page with a caps URL and lower URL and see if they are really different pages or link to the same address. When you change random letters to caps in our site it sends you to the right page but my browser still shows the mixed caps url instead of replacing with an all lower url - but is that really a different page or is the browser just not changing the caps display when it is really getting the lower case page ```