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
-
Unsolved Moz Pro crawl signaling missing canonical which are not?
Hi,
Moz Pro | | rolandvintners
I'm trying MozPro considering using it.
One of the tool which is appealing is the crawl and insights.
After quick use, I really question many of the alerts, for instance, I got a "missing canonical tag" on this url: https://vintners.co/wine/grawu_gto#2020 but when I check my markup, there's clearly a canonical tag: <link rel="canonical" href="https://vintners.co/wine/grawu_gto"> Anybody can explain?
I asked Moz Pro staff when being onboarded but didn't get an answer...
Honestly, I'm questioning the value of these crawls, or may be I miss something?0 -
Unsolved Site Crawl Stalled and Can't Restart
In my GreenSeed campaign, the site crawl continues to say "in progress." I can't figure out how to stop it or how to restart the site crawl. Can you please help?
Moz Pro | | Winger1 -
Crawl Diagnostics - 350 Critical errors? But I used rel-canonical links
Hello Mozzers, We launched a new website on Monday and had our first MOZ crawl on 01/07/15 which came back with 350+ critical errors. The majority of these were for duplicate content. We had a situation like this for each gym class: GLOBAL YOGA CLASS (canonical link / master record) YOGA CLASS BROMLEY YOGA CLASS OXFORD YOGA CLASS GLASGOW etc All of these local Yoga pages had the canonical link deployed. So why is this regarded as an error by MOZ? Should I have added robots NO INDEX instead? Would think help? Very scared our rankings are gonna get effected 😞 Ben
Moz Pro | | Bendall0 -
How to fix the Crawl Diagnostics error and warnings
hi im new to the seo world and i dont know a lot about it , so after my site get crawled i found 1 error and 151 warning and 96 notices , it that bad ?? and plz cam someone explain to me how to fix thos problem , a will be very thankful
Moz Pro | | medlife0 -
Crawl findings 301 redirects I didn't make?
Hi, I'm new to SEOMOZ Pro and loving it so far, but was confused as to how the 51 page Crawl of my site (http://cryptophoneaustralia.com) found so many 301 redirects. 18 to be exact. It's a Wordpress site, and my htaccess file has no 301's in it, so I'm kind of confused as to where to start looking as to why they've shown up in the crawl. I've been building sites for years, and use 301's quite regularly, but this site should have none. The site was originally on a subdomain until it was ready to go live, then I moved the site to it's current domain and ran the Velvet Blues plugin to update all the URLs. I then went through and manually changed the ones in areas where this plugin tends to miss. The site still functions fine, it just bothers me why the 301's are being found in the crawl. Thank you.
Moz Pro | | TrentDrake0 -
Another guest blogging question (sorry)
Hi, I have been kind of stuck with guest blogging lately. The amount of times I have seen PR1/2 root domains but SEOMOZ tool bar says DA:35/40 mR:4+ mT:4+ I know you are supposed to look at the content itself and other aspects but what do you trust more SEOMOZ tool bar or Googles PR? Cheers
Moz Pro | | activitysuper0 -
Help Understanding Crawl results on this site
I'm just starting to SEO this site http://thefirmbusinessbrokerage.com/welcome and I'm having trouble with the crawl report data. First question, should I be building links to the site above or the main page http://thefirmbusinessbrokerage.com/ (which is a flash intro). If I build links to the flash page, what do I do to the forwarding URL to the welcome page to make it effective? Second question, why does the crawl data report show up almost completely blank? Is this site perfect or are there some onsite issues that I'm not seeing. Thanks for your support and guidance on this site. I'm not hosting the site, just building links and offering optimization advice onsite. JOE
Moz Pro | | KreativElement0 -
How to Stop SEOMOZ from Crawling a Sub-domain without redoing the whole campaign?
I am using SEOMOZ for a client to track their website's performance and fix any errors and issues. A few weeks ago, they created a sub-domain (sub.example.com) to create a niche website for some of their specialized content. However, when SEOMOZ re-crawled the main domain (example.com), it also reported the errors for the subdomain. Is there any way to stop SEOMOZ from crawling the subdomain and only crawl the main domain? I know that can be done by starting a new campaign, but is there any way to work around an existing campaign? I'm asking because we would like to avoid the setting up the campaign again and losing the historical data as well. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | TheNorthernOffice790