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
-
How crucial are H1 tags and descriptions in wordpress categories?
Hi all Trying to improve SEO for my (mostly) local site, www.nectarbridge.com, and recently got back on Moz Pro account. First crawl of my site by Moz, a manageable number of issues that I've mostly sorted, but the category with the largest number of problems is missing or invalid tags. My content pages and blog posts are not missing the tags. It's category, archives, etc., including multiple pages, ex: https://www.nectarbridge.com/category/blog/page/4/ A smaller number of pages are being flagged by Moz as missing descriptions, and they are also category pages and the like. So the question is - how hard should I pursue fixing these issues? I'm using the divi theme, which apparently doesn't display the category description by default (if it did, that would kill two birds with one stone). There is a fix to add the category description, but before I get into that I'm trying to discern whether this issue really matters greatly to SEO or if I should spend that time just working on more content.
Moz Pro | | gary_nectarbridge0 -
Duplicate content in crawl despite canonical
Hi! I've had a bunch of duplicate content issues come up in a crawl, but a lot of them seem to have canonical tags implemented correctly. For example: http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Fireplaces http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Nursery http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Turntables http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Turntables?page=0 Aztec http://www.alwayshobbies.com/brands/aztec-imports/-catg=Turntables?page=1 Any ideas on what's happening here?
Moz Pro | | neooptic0 -
Ranking report and language
Unfortunately I noticed a huge problem in rank tracker amd ranking report. My site is in italian and I configurate the ranking report using google italy. The problem is that the ranking is related to www.google.it but using a browser set with english language!! Infact for a specific keyword the ranking position is 8 (using english) and 12 (using italian). This is a huge problem for me and makes useless any report! F
Moz Pro | | fabrico230 -
Dup titles based on capitaization
I am getting a lot of duplicate title errors when the only difference reported in SEOMoz's detail download shows that the capitalization in URL's from 2 referrer's is slightly different. But there's really only one page. See the example list of dups below: Title: <colgroup><col width="511"></colgroup>
Moz Pro | | tdawgtoo
| College Classroom Maps | URL: <colgroup><col width="566"></colgroup>
| http://www.wall-maps.com/Classroom/College-maps.htm | Dup'S URL from another page: <colgroup><col width="566"></colgroup>
| http://www.wall-maps.com/Classroom/College-Maps.htm | So you see the M in maps is capitalized in the A tag on the second referring page. I would be pretty shocked to learn that Google would consider this a duplicate title, but I am always learning new things. I do have canonical set up on my home page because this site can be accessed by www.wall-maps.com and wall-maps.com. So I don't think it's a lack of a canonical. Could this be a bug in SEOMoz's crawler or is it because IIS is not case sensitive and maybe Apache is?? Thanks in advance to whom ever can shed some light on this. Ted0 -
Can you set-up a manual SEOmoz crawl?
I received a crawl report yesterday, made some site changes, and would like to see if those changes were done correctly. Rather than wait a week for my automatic crawl to be generated, is there anyway to initiate a manual crawl on a single subdomain as a PRO member? As a PRO member, you can schedule crawls for 2 subdomains every 24 hours, and you'll get up to 3,000 pages crawled per subdomain. When we've finished crawling, your reports will be sent to your PRO email address, which is currently From here... http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test
Moz Pro | | ICM0 -
Crawl frequency
What is the frequency of crawl. My crawl diagnostics shows data from over a month ago
Moz Pro | | deBreezeInteractive0 -
Frequency of the Campaign reports
Hello there, I would like to know the frequency of the New Rankings and On-page reports for the campaigns that we set up. We received our last campaign report on 3rd September for all the 5 campaigns. We also received 2 reports again on 9th September. Can you please let me know how often do we get these reports and can we manage to receive them every week or fortnight. Best Regards Sandeep
Moz Pro | | CalistonDigital0 -
How long does a crawl take?
A crawl of my site started on the 8th July & is still going on - is there something wrong???
Moz Pro | | Brian_Worger1