SEOMOZ crawler ignoring redirect?
-
My crawl report for www.poker-coaching.net show a number of duplicate content warnings.
First, it shows a warning for www.poker-coaching.net and www.poker-coaching.net/, although there is a redirect in place for this, and for non-www. to www. as well. So IMO there is no duplicate content here, so why the error message?
Next, it shows a duplicate content warning for a number of pages, but when I click the number on the right, there is no info an which pages contain the duplicate content. Will this info be there later when the crawl is completed?My problem is that this is my oldest site, but since over one year it seems to have a penalty which I can't get rid of - I cannot identify the reason for the penalty. I already rebuilt the site from scratch once, but I still do not see results.
If a membership at SEOMOZ would be able to help me bring this site back on track, that would already be worth one years membership fees, so I'd really be very thankful if someone could take a look at the site and give me an idea about what needs to be done here.
-
I just want to make myself a little bit clearer here. While I appreciate any advice on why the site's rankings might be (mildly) affected, I am more interested in finding out why the site might have been penalized (which is most probably the case).
Here are my suspicions:- I had three articles that were 45% duplicate - thanks to one of my writers, may he rest in peace ;)), but they were removed/rewritten 2 months ago
- I had a guy build some links for me about a year ago and he set up a link wheel without my consent, so the link profile might be a problem (too many similar links?)
- Duplicate content because same article exists on my site with different URLs?
- Too many links from main page (as suggested by your colleague, although I doubt very much that this can cause a penalty)
- Panda related - although my content is of good quality
- Site structure for the multiple languages (.net for german is one Joomla installation, and the other /xlang/ is a separate Joomla install where I use Joomfish for the various translation
Any ideas?
-
Think of it this way...
If you got a link from the New York Times, it would boost your rankings. But then imagine the New York Times was caught buying links from terrorist, turns into a porn site, and is penalized by Google (extreme example). Your site wouldn't be penalized by this, but you'd loose the huge boost you once had from the link.
So those links that were once helping you, if those sites were penalized then the links are less valuable. You aren't being penalized, you just aren't getting the good link juice you once had.
Just a possibility.
On the affiliate links... I completely agree with you, and have used a similar technique myself with no problem. I'd simply add a nofollow just to be safe.
-
Duplicate URL: but I do have a redirect in place from with / to without, that's why I was surprised to see this pop up as an error? Actually I redirected http://poker-coaching.net, http://poker-coaching.net/ and http://www.poker-coaching.net/; all point to http://www.poker-coaching.net (suing the function of AceSEF module for this).
Per 1.: Ok this is something I will consider.
Per 2.: I use those redirects on all my sites, never had any problems with those? It's a very common thing with affiliate sites btw.
Per 3.: Isn't it agreed upon that your site cannot be hit with a penalty because a bad neighborhood site links to you (as opposed to me linking to such a site, which of course can be a big problem)? Webmasters don't have control over sites that give them links. If Google were to penalize me for that, would we all be google-bowling our competitors sites?
I can see problems with a link profile where maybe too many links have the same title and thus look unnatural, when you look at my link profile would you say that might be the case?This site has given me so much problem I was considering "selling" it to someone else, host/rebuild it on a different server and do a reconsideration request telling Google I am the new owner... Tried regular reconsideration requests several times, but G always tell me there is no manual penalty, so I must have tripped some algorithm. Question is, which one?
-
Hi Catfish,
Technically, www.poker-coaching.net and www.poker-coaching.net/ are 2 separate URLs. One with the trailing backslash, the other without. To be perfectly compliant, you would want to make sure that one redirects to the other. You can use a tool like this: http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/check-server-headers-tool/ to check. For example, see how the homepage of SEOmoz does a 301 redirect when it contains a trailing slash - http://www.seomoz.org/ redirects to http://www.seomoz.org
That said, Google has said this isn't that big of deal. So fixing it would make you technically correct, but it probably won't have that big of difference.
On the the penalty... I see 2 potential problems.
1. Huge number of links on each page. The drop down navigation is huge. I've seen Google crack down on sites like this with lots and lots of nav links above the fold. I'd cut those in 1/2 and see what happens.
2. Meta Refresh. You have a lot of affiliate links that redirect via meta refresh. I see that you have blocked these pages with robots.txt, but you might want to add rel="nofollow" to those links as well.
3. A lot of your backlinks are from poker related sites (which is good, in a way) but it is possible that they were hit by penalties as well. If the folks linking to you were devalued, you suffer as well. I'm not saying this is definitely the case, but building a more robust link profile never hurt.
Hope this helps! best of luck.
-
Thanks a lot!
-
Hey Catfish,
Today I have a full scheduled day, but tomorrow I can take a look what is happening over them. We'll keep in touch.
Istvan
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
-
Alot of 302 Redirects, what to do?
I'm currently auditing my companies website, and we encountered thousands of 302 redirects. The 302 pages are products page, which is a question and answer module at the bottom of each products page. What best practice should I do to get rid of the 302 redirects? add those pages to the .robots.txt? Or do individually and add a no index? This would help boost our rankings up correct?
On-Page Optimization | | petmkt0 -
With 301 Redirects Does Changing URLs Matter?
We are redesigning our website in order to give it a more modern visual look. For the most part all the content will remain the same. Our old site is hosted on .asp so all of our current URLs look something like this: www.example.com/products/food.asp We plan on using 301 redirects in order to update every URL and remove the .asp. Since we are going to be doing 301 redirects for every existing URL anyways, does it matter from an SEO and ranking standpoint, if we also change the content and structure of the URL? For example, would we see a ranking impact if we were to change the above example URL to www.example.com/food? Obviously we want to try to retain as much link juice and ranking factors as possible during this redesign. Another issue we are seeing is with the image file names of our existing website images. We are moving to a new CMS platform (WordPress) that automatically saves images using a folder path similar to this: wp-uploads/2015-08/food. Will that change affect our SEO or ranking at all? When Google crawls an image does it care about the full path? Any insight would be much appreciated! 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Redirect both / and non-/ URLs?
I am doing SEO on WP site. Due to some duplicate pages (rel canonical was done before) I am doing 301 redirects at the moment. And I wonder if I need to redirect both links w/ and w/o trailing slash. Default is non www, w/o trailing slash. Like there is .com/category/news but there is same page linked in .com/news (well it works when permalink structure is set to /%category%/%postname% and returns 404 error when structure is set to /%postname%).
On-Page Optimization | | OVJ
I redirected .lt/naujienos to .lt/category/naujienos. Should I also redirect .lt/naujienos/ (with trailing slash)? There's absolutely no problem redirecting this, but there are some more pages which I want to edit their URLs and I wonder If I should do both redirects from links /w and w/o slash?1 -
The seomoz on page keyword analysis tool is not showing title or keyword in document
the SEOMOZ onpage analysis tool is not not showing title or keyword for any page in one of my sites. It says there are no title elements on my page and there are, i checked the source code myself and they are there and correct. my title and keywords are in there and show up fine in firefox and internet explorer even after i refresh them. why would this tool show them as missing in one of my sites but not others? I'm worried that google's spider might not see them if the on page analyzer doesn't see them and my rankings might drop. they showed up the other day in the seomoz on page analyzer just fine and i haven't changed anything. Thanks mozzers!
On-Page Optimization | | Ron100 -
I noticed that my company owns a few exact match domains that are relevant to our business. Is it worth doing anything other than just redirecting them to our homepage?
It turns out we own a few exact match domains that are relevant to our business. Is it worth doing anything other than just redirecting? (We have owned these sites for a long time, over 15 years.) The keywords are moderate to low in traffic and moderate to high in competitiveness. (Right now they 301 to our main site.) I know exact match is not as valuable as it used to be and that there are mixed opinions about microsites...
On-Page Optimization | | Linda-Vassily0 -
Followed seomoz advice for on page tweaks but dropped
Hi all We followed seomoz advice regarding on-page tweaks for this page: http://www.compactlaw.co.uk/agency-agreement.html Dropped 10 places by Google UK. Obviously could be a coincidence, but any on-page critique very gladly received. (But also seem to have been dropped by Google across the board in the past week or so. Usual trouble of trying to find causes. But specific page advice would be a start and much appreciated.) Regards P
On-Page Optimization | | dexm100 -
What's the Best Way to Hide Redirects from Search Engines?
Hey everybody, I like to use php redirects for affiliate links so they look better. I keep them all in the same directory. I read recently that these may hurt SEO. A couple quick questions: Is this the best way to redirect affiliate links? Should I simply block the directory in robots.txt? Any other suggestions from you SEO guyses and galz? Thanks! Jared
On-Page Optimization | | JaredB0 -
301 redirect OK for a newer version of a page that is a different url?
I have about 500 products with multiple urls for the same product, but different versions. I sell wine and have a different page for each vintage. I've decided that is not the best way to go, and want to point the older vintage pages to the latest version page, and make that the only page for the product as time goes on. Do I have to put a link in the text from each older page to the newer, or can I use a 301 to redirect them to the new page? I don't want google to think I'm pulling something funny.
On-Page Optimization | | JeanYates0