Google attempting to crawl wrong URLs

[Asterickx]

In the server logs I see Google attempting to crawl wrong URLs like:
/sectionX/pageA.php/pageB.php
which I suspect are caused by some kind of negative SEO, since such links never existed on this website.
Why negative SEO? Because such links generate duplicates and also lead to a waste of crawl budget.
I'm unable to find the originating pages (if any), for they are likely cloaked.

What I have done so far was self-canonicalizing all pages, solving the duplicates issue.
I'm also thinking about ReWriting all pageA.php/pageB.php to pageA.php. This looks like a better solution (301 could make G forget about these links), but I wonder what I might be missing here.

Could you please advise.

 

[david]

A couple of thoughts:
- Are you sure that there are no relative urls on your page to pageB.php?
- Does GSC mention links to these urls?
- If it is negative SEO, perhaps 410 these urls instead of 301. Who knows what kind of sh*t anchors or pages they're linking to you with.