Has any on else experienced a spike in crawl errors?
-
Hi,
Since the last time our sites were crawled in SEOmoz they are all showing a spike in Errors. (Mainly duplicate page titles and duplicate content).
We haven't changed anything to the structure of the sites but they are all using the same content management system.
The image is an example of what we are witnessing for all our sites based on the same system.
Is anyone else experiencing anything similar? or does anyone know of any changes that SEOmoz has implemented which may be affecting this?
Anthony.
-
Thanks for all your replies.
We haven't changed anything on any of the sites. We use our own CMS which has not changed either.
Webmaster tools doesn't show the same errors as SEOMoz.
We appear to be in the same situation as Mike. We know that we have duplicate titles and content but we have taken care of our duplicate issues using canonical and no index tags, which drastically reduced our errors. For some reason SEOmoz doesn't seem to have paid heed to them on it's latest crawl.
Thanks Mike. At least we are not on our own.
Maybe I should see if this is rectified after the next SEOMoz crawl before I pursue this any further?
-
This leads me to a problem then. As per Dave (the author of the article), "using canonical tags will result in duplicate errors being suppressed. If one page refers to another as a duplicate, than that pair will not be reported as duplicates. Also, if two pages both refer to the same third page as their canonical, then they will not be reported as duplicates of each other, either."
But now that this change has gone into effect I have 2000+ more duplicate content errors appearing and they are all pages with rel="canonical" pointing to the original page. So, as he stated earlier in the post this has caused "the most negative customer experience we anticipate: having a behind-the-scenes change of our duplicate detection heuristic causing a sudden rash of incorrect "duplicate page" errors to appear for no apparent good reason."
Is this something that will eventually correct itself or is this something that will need tweaking of the new detection method?
-
We did change the way we detected duplicate content earlier this month. Here's a blog post about it at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/visualizing-duplicate-web-pages.
Hope this helps explain things for you! Let me know if you have any more questions.
-
I saw a huge spike after the last crawl. In my case, the canonicals we set on our site months ago to handle some duplicate content issues appear not to be seen by Seomoz's crawl. Though when I check for duplicate title & meta issues in Webmaster Tools I don't see the offending pages that SEOMoz is showing me. That leads me to believe something is happening with either how the SEOMoz system is reporting or how their bot is crawling.
-
What CMS are you using?
Did you add any menus to your home or sub-pages (ie footer menus or anything like that?)
Have you gone into the Errors and see what pages are being duplicated?
Have you implemented rel=canonical on the pages?
Is your CMS creating Titles for you or are they manually created?
Have you checked WMT to see if the duplicate issue is there too? (under html improvements)
-
No spikes in either of our campaigns.
You said that yours were related to duplicate page titles / content which likely means your CMS is generating duplicate pages. Could be related to reviews, sorting, comments etc..
Have had a chance to research the errors and see if those pages actually exist? We had an issue with Oscommerce and page sorting causing this same problem, we fixed it by implementing rel canonical tags.
Hope that helps
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
503 Error or 200 OK??
So, in a Moz crawl and a Screaming From crawl, I'm getting some 503 Service Unavailable responses on the some pages. So I go to the pages in question, and the Moz bar is showing a 200 OK. The SEOBook http status checker (http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/) also shows a 200 OK. What gives? The only reason I'm looking at this is because rankings plummeted a couple of weeks ago. Thanks! UPDATE So, I decided to use the mozbar to set the user agent as Googlebot and when I tried to access the pages in question I receive this message. I don't think this is an issue... anyone else have much experience here? Your access to this site has been limited Your access to this service has been temporarily limited. Please try again in a few minutes. (HTTP response code 503) Reason: Fake Google crawler automatically blocked Important note for site admins: If you are the administrator of this website note that your access has been limited because you broke one of the Wordfence firewall rules. The reason you access was limited is: "Fake Google crawler automatically blocked". If this is a false positive, meaning that your access to your own site has been limited incorrectly, then you will need to regain access to your site, go to the Wordfence "options" page, go to the section for Firewall Rules and disable the rule that caused you to be blocked. For example, if you were blocked because it was detected that you are a fake Google crawler, then disable the rule that blocks fake google crawlers. Or if you were blocked because you were accessing your site too quickly, then increase the number of accesses allowed per minute. If you're still having trouble, then simply disable the Wordfence firewall and you will still benefit from the other security features that Wordfence provides. If you are a site administrator and have been accidentally locked out, please enter your email in the box below and click "Send". If the email address you enter belongs to a known site administrator or someone set to receive Wordfence alerts, we will send you an email to help you regain access. Please read our FAQ if this does not work.
Moz Pro | | wiredseo0 -
Rogerbot does not catch all existing 4XX Errors
Hi I experienced that Rogerbot after a new Crawl presents me new 4XX Errors, so why doesn't he tell me all at once? I have a small static site and had 9 crawls ago 10 4XX Errors, so I tried to fix them all.
Moz Pro | | inlinear
The next crawl Rogerbot fount still 5 Errors so I thought that I did not fix them all... but this happened now many times so that I checked before the latest crawl if I really fixed all the errors 101%. Today, although I really corrected 5 Errors, Rogerbot digs out 2 "new" Errors. So does Rogerbot not catch all the errors that have been on my site many weeks before? Pls see the screenshot how I was chasing the errors 😉 404.png0 -
The crawl report shows a lot of 404 errors
They are inactive products, and I can't find any active links to these product pages. How can I tell where the crawler found the links?
Moz Pro | | shopwcs0 -
1 week has passed: Crawled pages still N/A
Roughly one week ago I went pro, and then I created a campaing for the smallish webshop that I'm employed at, however it doesn't seem to crawl. I've check our visitors log and while we find other bots such as google, bing, yandex and so fourth, seomoz bot hasn't been visible. Perhaps I'm looking for a normal useragent, ohwell, onwards. While I thought it might take time, as a small test I added a domain that I've owned for sometime but don't really use, that target site is only 17 pages, now this site was crawled almost within the hour, and I realised that our ~5000pages on the main campaing would take some time, but wouldn't the initial 250 pages be crawled by now? I should add, that I didn't add http:// to the original Campaing, but the one that got crawled I did. I cannot seem to change this myself inorder to spot if that's the problem or not. Anyone has any ideas, should I just wait or is there something I can activly do to force it to start rolling?
Moz Pro | | Hultin0 -
Only few pages (308 pages of 1000 something pages) have been crawled and diagnosed in 4 days, how many days till the entire website is crawled complete?
Setup campaign about 4-5 days ago and yesterday rogerbot said 308 pages were crawled and the diagnostics were provided. This website has over 1000+ pages and would like to know how long it would take for roger to crawl the entire website and provide diagnostics. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | TejaswiNaidu0 -
Can i force another crawl on my site to see if it recognizes my changes?
i had a problem w/dup content and titles on my site, i fixed them immediately and im wondering if i can run another crawl on my site to see if my changes were recognized thanks shaun
Moz Pro | | daugherty0 -
Is The Crawl Diagnostic tool working correctly?
The Crawl Diagnostic tool shows issues and displays a graph but they don't display the page specific results/suggestion like it used to. I get the "Congratulations, there are no pages affected by this issue!" message.
Moz Pro | | -PAUL-0 -
Errors went from 2420 to ZERO
Of course this happened without my intervention, i don't know why but seomoz is reporting 0 errors.
Moz Pro | | iFix0