Why does the crawl report say I should have meta description and title tags in my xml files?
-
Just had my first crawl report today which has been very useful in finding missing and duplicated title tags and meta descriptions but it has flagged up the fact that my xml files are missing these. Surely non HTML documents shouldn't have them (or need them) so why are they showing up in the report?
-
TBH it's a while ago I heard it and can't remember which site it was on. I've subscribed to so many SEO forums!!
Happy to get fresh advice on the matter as I have no particular desire to have the sitemaps crawlable or visible on the site. What are your feelings about ROR, RSS and OPML sitemaps?
-
Hi Pandy,
Could you give me a heads up on the resource that says you should link to your sitemap.xml? Interested in reading that
In my experience, search engines expect the sitemap to be at www.root.com/sitemap.xml so there would be no need to link to it from your site.
-
Thanks Yannick.
The site does link to sitemaps in XML, RSS, OPML, Text and HTML formats. This has been advised not for Google but for other search engines and bots which may be crawling the site. There are also links to RSS feeds which are showing in the report as well.
Highland - the XML files are generated by a third party so I would hope they are returning proper application type! The browser certainly renders them as XML.
-
Highland has a good suggestion. Otherwise:
You might have found a bug there There shouldn't be any title tags and description tags in XML files. So I suggest you submit it as a bug.
Other thought that comes up: why does the crawler find XML files? That (probably?) means that you're linking to those files on your site? Which isn't really necessary You only need to link to it in your robots.txt file or submit it to Google Webmaster Tools.
-
Are your XML files returning a proper application type? If it's being shown as "text/html" it's possible the bot got confused.
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
-
Inbound links not showing in reports
My clients site so far only has a few inbound links. If I do a report on MOZ/Open Site Explorer it only lists 10 domains linking in and, a number of important ones are not on that list. As an example, one of the leading UK national newspapers (Daily Telegraph) has a link on this page to the client www.vidavida.co.uk and yet this link/domain does not appear in the above reports. Is this an intentional nofollow type thing that the telegraph does and is there a way for me to check that on their site/page? http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG8655068/Holiday-travel-in-style.html Any comments most appreciated. Thanks,
Moz Pro | | MrFrisbee
C0 -
Crawl Errors from URL Parameter
Hello, I am having this issue within SEOmoz's Crawl Diagnosis report. There are a lot of crawl errors happening with pages associated with /login. I will see site.com/login?r=http://.... and have several duplicate content issues associated with those urls. Seeing this, I checked WMT to see if the Google crawler was showing this error as well. It wasn't. So what I ended doing was going to the robots.txt and disallowing rogerbot. It looks like this: User-agent: rogerbot Disallow:/login However, SEOmoz has crawled again and it still picking up on those URLs. Any ideas on how to fix? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | WrightIMC0 -
Why aren't canonical tags reducing duplicate page title/content?
We have canonical tags set up for a feature page on one of our sites. This site has an image gallery controlled by javascript. To aid the user experience the image can also be specified by a URL parameter (the javascript also uses this URL to fetch the images). The SEOMoz report complains that the links to these images have duplicate page titles and content. To try and combat this we set canonical tags to point only to the original page, without the slideshow parameter. e.g. http://www.example.com/feature-page/ http://www.example.com/feature-page/?slideshow=1 -> canonical tag set to http://www.example.com/feature-page/ http://www.example.com/feature-page/?slideshow=2 -> canonical tag set to http://www.example.com/feature-page/ The latest SEOMoz report has come back and the errors still exist. What can we do to remove these error messages? Thanks
Moz Pro | | TJSSEO1 -
Automated SEO Report for Agencies
I have a lot of SEO reports to send out, SEO Moz is awesome but it's not designed for this kind of work. I would like an automated report that does an on page optimization report on the potential client's site, finding errors etc it does not have to include fixes for each. This is just a basic report but it must look nice and be user friendly. I have looked at Raven and it looks ok however it does not have any decent On Page Optimization reports. I know I could crawl and then delete the campaign in SEO Moz but that is very time consuming and far from ideal. If anyone knows of a solution please let me know 🙂
Moz Pro | | SEOKeith0 -
SEOMOZ reports the statistics.
SEOMOZ reports the Statistics, but where do i manage & improve??? Simply Statistics is all about SEOMOZ??
Moz Pro | | webicers0 -
SEOmoz crawl diagnostics report - what are the duplicate pages urls?
I just see the number of duplicates but not what the urls of the duplicates are? I don't see it in the export either, but maybe I'm missing it Cheers S
Moz Pro | | firstconversion0 -
Trifecta Report (domain)
Recently i have found that the data in the trifecta report is becoming less complete. For the last few sites i found that the report returned about half of the metrics it was looking for. For instance, it mentioned that one of the domains did not have a dmoz or wikipedia link/page even though they had both? Also, it rarely returns the Yahoo Site Explorer metrics even though when clicking to see the source the data is there? Are you guys planning on phasing out this tool, if not it seems like some work needs to be done on cleaning it up. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | kchandler1 -
Question about when new crawls start
Hi everyone, I'm currently using the trial of seomoz and I absolutely love what I'm seeing. However, I have 2 different websites (one has over 10,000 pages and one has about 40 pages). I've noticed that the smaller website is crawled every few days. However, the larger site hasn't been crawled in a few days. Although both campaigns state that the sites won't be crawled until next Monday, is there any way to get the crawl to start sooner on the large site? The reason that I've asked is that I've implemented some changes that will likely decrease the amount of pages that are crawled simply based upon the recommendations on this site. So, I'm excited to see the potential changes. Thanks, Brian
Moz Pro | | beeneeb0