Abnormal crawl issues appearing in my Moz results
-
I have been asked to look at a site for a friend and was more than surprised to see 16,9k crawl issues appear in the dashboard... of this 6,238 are duplicate page content and 5878 are duplicated page titles.
What on earth is going on? I have spoken to the web developer as it appears there is a dev site somewhere and this is his response
[Can I stress that Google determines which site was in the index first and then removes other sites it sees as having duplicate content. Our dev sites appearing in the search index would not affect your ranking due to duplicate content as Google would see your site as the first site with the content]
As I cannot make contact with him, I am scratching my head, surely a dev site should be no-indexed, it sounds as though he is saying that its ok because Google will take the main site as the first site with the content...
Very confused! Help need MOZ community.
Manythanks,
Sarah
-
Thanks again Dirk. I like your direct and knowledgeable responses. I have sent a Linkedin connection!!
Many thanks,
Sarah
-
Hi Sarah,
Googlebot will follow these links as well and discover these "useless" pages (the are off course not useless from human perspective but they don't add value for bots - and they will be considered as duplicates). Duplicates are no reason for "punishment" - so you could just let them be. Personally I would put a nofollow on these links or add a "noindex" tag to the login page. Normally you shouldn't use nofollow on internal links - but login pages are an exemption on this (check also https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2298312/matt-cutts-you-dont-have-to-nofollow-internal-links : "Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule, and things like login pages can be the exception. He said it doesn’t hurt to put the nofollow link for a link pointing to a login page, or things like terms and conditions or other “useless” pages. However, it doesn’t hurt at all for those pages to be crawled by Google."
For the practical part - if you add an additional question to a question which has been marked as answered - only the ones who have already answered will see the additional question. To be on the safe side - it's better open a new question if you want other people to have a look at it.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
-
hello Dirk, thank you for that great answer, we have since been doing a bit more digging of our own and before we go back to the web developer we want to check what should be happening with the links the we are finding duplicated as we are seeing that the issues relating to Duplicate Pages are coming from links from the login page which shows information about where the user was redirected from.
For example, if the visitor is not logged on and wishes to wish-list an item, they will be redirected to the login page, with the item code and intended action in the url; which can then continue on to the desired page once logged on.
The MOZ crawler is seeing these pages as having Duplicated Content whilst they are all the same apart from a piece of information in the URL. Should we be blocking these duplications? Are they a risk to us? What should we be doing?
I have also added this as a new question - I am quite new to this community thing so wasn't sure which was the best way to ask the question.
Many thanks again,
Sarah
-
Moz is only indexing pages it's crawler is able to find. This implies that on your production site you have links to your development site.
Don't really agree with what your dev is saying - he should correct these links first; put a noindex on these pages. Alternative - put a password on the dev site so it's only accessible with a password. If a lot of users are putting links to your dev site it could become more important than your main site. Google will try to choose the most appropriate site - but you have no guarantee that it will choose the right version. In any case - that's not the type of risk you should be willing to take.
Once this is done - you can request a removal of these pages via the search console.
If all pages are removed from the index you can adapt the robots.txt to prevent access to the Google & other bots. Do this only after all pages are removed - if not Google will never find the noindex directive.
Dirk
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
-
No Ranking Keywords in Moz
I am using the link explorer to search my website https://bestsportsmask.com/ in Moz. But it is showing no ranked keywords but in other tools it's showing some keywords. What could be the issue.
Moz Pro | | DanielMaier0 -
Malware on Moz?
Hi guys. Today at evening I received few notifications from my anitivirus about malware on Moz. Does anyone have similar issue? q8gWqIo.jpg
Moz Pro | | Dmitriy_S0 -
Possible Crawling Problem with Screaming Frog and Moz Crawlers
So I'm not sure if what I'm seeing is a problem or not. As of about two weeks ago the Moz crawler has only been able to see www.mysite.com, and none of the links, content, title, ect associated with the page. Essentially the report has one line, what should be the homepage, but it's not able to pull any information from the page but does show a 200 http status code. The report shows nothing blocked by robots or any errors. When I use screaming frog to crawl the site about 75% of the time it just reports one line www.mysite.com with a 200 status code, but again the crawler is not able to actually see the html. The other 25% of the time it works perfectly fine, crawls all pages and sees all meta info and content. There are no errors in Google WMT and everything looks ok there. We have seen a traffic drop the last two weeks but I don't know if this is the reason for it. I can't publicly post the page but if someone has an idea of what might be going on I'd be happy to PM them. Thanks
Moz Pro | | CJ50 -
Not provided traffic in Moz
Hello, I was wondering, if anyone knew how moz handles non provided keywords? is it not displayed, or is it labeled as something else? I know in WMT, it still displays it. Thanks for your help.
Moz Pro | | PeterRota1 -
Crawled pages are missing and showing just 1 page crawled
One of my campaign has got around 8500 pages crawled(seomoz) and reports are shown, but suddenly it is showing 1 page crawled. Why it is happened like this? How can i get back the previous reports?
Moz Pro | | Sulekha0 -
On the Crawl Diagnostics Summary, its reporting over 100 "Title Missing or Empty" issues, but they all check out fine?
Wondering if there Is a bug with the crawler or known timeout issues? Site speed is fast, but we do run a couple of large cron jobs out of hours, which may be the cause of any timeouts, but shouldn't the crawler report that, rather saying no title tags on 100 pages, when there are? SEOmoz newbie, so still finding my feet 🙂
Moz Pro | | sjr4x40 -
Unsubscribe to weekly crawl notifications never works
Hello! All of my campaigns have the box 'Weekly crawl completed for campaign ...' unticked under Campaign Settings, yet for all of them I still receive an email regularly with the subject 'New crawl completed for ...'. How do I stop this? Is there a bug here? Adam Bishop
Moz Pro | | arbishop0