Crawl Diagnostics 2261 Issues with Our Blog
-
I just recently signed up for MOZ, so much information. I've done the walk through and will continue learning how to us the tools. But I need your help.
Our first moz crawl indicated 2261 issues (447 404's, 803 duplicate content, 11 502's, etc). I've reviewed all of the crawls issues and they are linked to our Yahoo hosted WordPress blog. Our blog is over 9 years old. The only issue that I'm able to find is our categories are not set up correctly. I've searched for WordPress assistance on this topic and cant find any issues with our current category set up. Every category link that I click returns Nothing Found Apologies, but no results were found for the requested archive. Perhaps searching will help find a related post.
http://site.labellaflorachildrensboutique.com/blog/
Any assistance is greatly appreciated.
-
Go Dan!
-
While what Matt and CleverPHD (Hi Paul!) have said is correct - here's your specific issue:
Your categories are loading with "ugly" permalinks like this: http://site.labellaflorachildrensboutique.com/blog/?cat=175 (that loads fine)
But you are linking to them from the bottom of posts with the "clean" URLs --> http://screencast.com/t/RIOtqVCrs
The fix is that Catgory URLs need to load with "clean" URLs and the ugly one should redirect to the clean one.
Possible fixes:
- Try updating wordpress (I see you're on a slightly older version)
- See if you .htaccess file has been modified (ask a developer or your hosting for help with this perhaps)
Found another linking issue:
This link to Facebook in your left sidebar --> http://screencast.com/t/EqltiBpM it's just coded incorrectly. It adds the current page URL so you get a link like this http://site.labellaflorachildrensboutique.com/blog/category/unique-baby-girl-gifts/www.facebook.com/LaBellaFloraChildrensBoutique instead of your Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/LaBellaFloraChildrensBoutique
You can fix that Facebook link probably in Appearance->Widgets.
That one issue is causes about 200 of your broken URLs
-
One other thing I forgot. This video by Matt Cutts
It explains why Google might show a link even though the page was blocked by robots.txt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0
Google really tries not to forget URLs and this video reminds us that Google uses links not just for ranking, but discovery so you really have to pay attention to how you link internally. This is especially important for large sites.
-
Awesome! Thanks for straightening it out.
-
Yes, the crawler will avoid the category pages if they are in robots.txt. It sounded like from the question that this person was going to remove or change the category organization and so you would have to do something with the old URLs (301 or noindex) and that is why I would not use robots.txt in this case so that those directives can be seen.
If these category pages had always been blocked using robots.txt, then this whole conversation is moo as the pages never got in the index. It is when unwanted pages get in the index that you potentially want to get rid of that things get a little tricky, but workable.
I have seen issues where there are pages on sites that got into the index and ranking but they were the wrong pages and so the person just blocked with robots.txt. Those URLs continued to rank and cause problems with the canonical pages that should be ranking. We had to unblock, let Google see the 301, rank the new pages then put the old URLs back into robots to prevent the old URLs from getting back into the index.
Cheers!
-
Oh yeah, that's a great point! I've found that the category pages rarely rank directly, but you'll definitely want to double-check before outright blocking crawlers.
Just to check my own understanding, CleverPhD, wouldn't crawlers avoid the category pages if they were disallowed by robots.txt (presuming they obey robots.txt), even if the links were still on the site?
-
One wrinkle. If the category pages are in Google and potentially ranking well - you may want to 301 them to consolidate them into a more appropriate page (if this makes sense) or if you want to get them out of the index, use a meta noindex robots tag on the page(s) to have them removed from the index, then block them in robots.txt.
Likewise, you have to remove the links on the site that are pointing to the category pages to prevent Google from recrawling and reindexing etc.
-
Category pages actually turn up as duplicate content in Crawl Diagnostics _really _often. It just means that those categories are linked somewhere on your site, and the resulting category pages look almost exactly like all the others.
Generally, I recommend you use robots.txt to block crawlers from accessing pages in the category directory. Once that's done and your campaign has re-crawled your site, then you can see how much of the problem was resolved by that one change, and consider what to do to take care of the rest.
Does that make sense?
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
-
Best blog practices for website
For my Insurance website blog, I use MOZ to help me find high DA authoritative sites, then either generate ideas from them, or rewrite the copy. If I rewrite the copy, I tend to pull from 2 - 3 top authoritative sites. Just so I don't get in trouble, but still offer the most concision information. _My question is, Is this ok to do? _ Secondly, I just read that on some .Gov sites the information is public, and that you can use it as long as you give credit. _My questions is, how do I tell which information is public? _ Thank you in advance 🙂
Moz Pro | | MissThumann0 -
SEO for e-commerce, linking, brand mentions, insights diagnostics
Hi, I run the seo for www.bilthamber.com It is an e-commerce site selling car care products, and we also manufacture our own products. I was wondering how the seo for an e-commerce site might compare to the seo for a blog or information based site, or other types of site. And also how the seo for a particular product page on my site might compare to a information based page on my site. Are the tactics the same? Should you try and rank for similar terms, the same generic terms, or complelty unique terms for the best seo? Or should every page try and rank for different terms, to ensure that the engines dont rank 2 or more different pages for the same search term? And how many keywords or search terms should I try and rank a particular product page for? Or an information page, or blog page? Is there a minimum or maximum that is recommomended? Does the more terms you try and rank for on a page take the weight out of each of them? So having 4 really good search terms might be better than having 10 ok generic ones? How do I find out what are my best, most highly converting, most profitable keywords overtime for Google? I can find some information like this, but it is showing the stats for Bing UK, not Google, even though Google UK is my main engine in Moz. My domain authority has decreased by 3 this week, this is the first time it has gone down since I started with Moz a few months back, can anyone explain why? And how this will affect the rankings ect, and how I can get it back up higher agian? And for linking and brand mentions, what are the goals of this feature? Should I find my mentions and ask them to talk about us more and link to us properly? I'm not sure if this is right. Should I be asking other websites to make links to our pages, or should it be organic? And for the insights section, I am recieveing tons of issues a lot to do with duplicate content, will having the rel=carnocial tag fix these issues? I know thats a lot for 1 question, but its been building up in my head! Thanks in advance! Max
Moz Pro | | BiltHamber10 -
Is SeoMOZ Crawl Diagnostics wrong here?
We've been getting a ton of critical errors (about 80,000) in SeoMoz' Crawl Diagnostics saying we have duplicate content in our client's E-commerce site. Some of the errors are correct, but a lot of the pages are variations like: www.example.com/productlist?page=1 www.example.com/productlist?page=2 However, in our source code we have used rel="prev" and rel="next" so in my opinion we should be alright. Would love to hear from you if we have made a mistake or if it is an error in SeoMoz. Here's a full paste of the script:
Moz Pro | | Webdannmark0 -
How can I cancel a running crawl test?
I put in two urls that were incorrect and now I need to cancel the report generation. Is there a way to do this? And if so, would I get my crawl-credits back? Are they cumulative?
Moz Pro | | krenerr0 -
Only 1 page has been crawled. Why?
I set a new profile up a fortnight ago. Last week seomoz crawled the entire site (10k pages), and this week has only crawled 1 page. Nothing's changed on the site that I'm aware of, so what's happened?
Moz Pro | | tompollard0 -
Can you change crawl day of week?
Can I somehow sync the day of the week for each of my campaigns' crawls, so that all campaigns are updated on the same day?
Moz Pro | | ATShock0 -
Why did the crawl last night not show the same results i see in google?
Last night my keywords were crawled and it shows me that a key word is ranked 14. For 3 days now it has been rank 4 or 5. Is there a reason this is not accurate? I have not checked the rest of my keywords so i am not sure about those. Thanks
Moz Pro | | tom14cat140 -
Crawling a website with redirects
Hi, I started a campaign for a website which uses multiple redirects before showing the real content. in the crawling report only one page is crawled. Is there a way to let the crawler pass the redirects to get usefull reports? The website is www.cegeka.be Thank you
Moz Pro | | Cegeka0