SeoMoz crawler giving false positives?
-
SeoMoz crawler indicated a few times that my site has a duplicate home page error (http://mysite.com and www.mysite.com)
I eliminated the the couple remaining internal links that pointed to http://mysite on a couple pages (all other internal links point to http://www.mysite.com)
I ran the crawl again and it said no errors this time. I naturally thought the duplicate page error problem was fixed.
However this morning I got the regularly scheduled crawl report from SeoMoz that said again I have those duplicate error pages. No changes were made to any of my site's pages between the crawls.
That makes me wonder if the crawler is providing false positives at times or was wrong when it said on the crawl a couple days ago that I don't have any errors (no duplicate page error).
Now, I don't know what to think.
-
Hey,
Our crawler actually requests the page http://mysite.com first but then finds all your links to www.mysite.com
You will want to contact the person responsible for hosting or developing your site in order to make these changes.
Have a great day!
Kenny
-
Thanks for the explanation. Could you answer a couple questions?
1 - If all internal site links go to www.mysite.com (none link to http://mysite.com), how does a duplicate page even happen? I don't understand how this happened to begin with if I don't have any such internal link to http://mysite.com.
2 - Can you recommend a service who can fix the htaccess page for me to create the 301 redirect? I'm not sure I want the hosting service doing it and making a mistake.
Thanks!
-
Hey,
That third campaign is actually a subdomain setup to crawl non-www. No duplicate content errors were presented because there are not any links to follow since all the links contain the subdomain www in them.
Root domain campaigns are distinguished with an astrick before the domain name.
-
Thanks - I initially thought that was it.
But if you see my 3rd campaign of the crawl, it runs it for the root domain and it shows no duplicates.
-
Hey,
I just looked into the issue that you are experiencing with our crawler. The reason the the discrepancy is because you actually have two separate campaigns running for the same site. One is set to crawl the root domain and one the subdomain.
The root domain campaign actually still presents these errors and has week over week but the sub-domain campaign is setup for the www version of your site and that's why these errors are not present, because the crawler won't even attempt to crawl off of www.
It is advisable to perform a 301 redirect as the other commenters mention.
Hope that helps!
Kenny
-
My point is the inconsistency in the SeoMoz crawler reports.
I got two SeoMoz crawl reports today - one was the regularly scheduled one which said I have duplicate home pages (as noted) and the crawl I started a couple hours ago said there are no errors.
So...how do you tell which one is right? Both cannot be since there were no changes to my website pages between the crawls.
thx
-
Hi,
If needed - this is the .htaccess code to help fix this issue; (Make sure and back up .htaccess before making any chages)
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomainhere.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomainhere.com/$1 [L,R=301]
The above code would redirect all traffic from non www to www version of your site fixing dup content issues in that regard
Source ;http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php
PS Spaces between lines not needed (funky formatting here)
Hope this helps
-
You need to redirect one of your home pages to the other. www.mysite.com is different to the crawl robot as my site.com. In addition to having the issue with seomoz, you are losing serp value for your home page because you are dividing up the SEO value. Do a 301 redirect from one to the other and voila....problem solved.
Please make sure you give me the thumbs up for the help!! Thanks
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
-
Why are crawlers not picking up these pages?
Hi there, I've been asked to audit a new subdomain for a travel company. It's all a bit messy, so it's going to take some time to remedy. However, one thing I couldn't understand was the low number of pages appearing in certain crawlers. The subdomain has many pages. A homepage, category pages then product pages. Unfortunately, tools like Screaming Frog and xml-sitemaps.com are only picking up 19 pages and I can't figure out why. Google has so far indexed around 90 pages - this is by no means all of them, but that's probably because of the new domain and lack of sitemap etc. After looking at the crawl results, only the homepage and category (continent pages) are showing. So all the product pages are not. for example, tours.statravel.co.uk/trip/Amsterdam_Kings_Day_(Start_London_end_London)-COCCKDM11 is not appearing in the crawl results. After reviewing the source code, I can't see anything that would prevent this page being crawled. Am I missing something? At the moment, the crawl should be picking up around 400+ product pages, but it's not picking up any. Thanks
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Why is it the crawler saying I have 9 Duplicate Page Titles?
Hi, I received my weekly web crawl and it is saying this: | 4 | Duplicate Page Content |
Technical SEO | | afrohairsolutions
| 22 | Missing Meta Description Tag |
| 9 | Duplicate Page Title |
| 1 | Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters) |
| 1 | Title Element Too Short |
| 1 | 301 (Permanent Redirect) | I'm new to SEO and don't know how to fix this, I don't really see how I have Duplicate Page Content or Duplicate Page Title. This is my website: afrohairsolutions.co.uk Thank you in advance.0 -
My site keeps losing positions, Please help!!
Hello, This is the first time I post on this forum but have been a Pro Member for about 11 months. Im going crazy the more I do the more it drop positions. My problem is that one of the sites that Im working is has not been on the top 50 of any of the keywords. There were many issues but I have reduce the number. Im not sure if I can post the link here or via PM. My market is very competitive and Im using word press. One of my target keywords is: web design miami I would like for a member to give me an opinion of my site and may tell me what Im doing wrong. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | ogdcorp0 -
On-Page SEO of the SEOmoz Blog Section
Hey Everyone My brain isn't working (only had 1 cup of coffee so far - #2 on it's way) this morning and I could use some help. We're creating a blog on a site for a client of ours and I've been looking at the SEOmoz blog for best practices when it comes to the implementation of pagination, canonical tags and noindex. My questions: There is no use of the canonical tag on the main blog page or any of the paginated pages but it is being used on blog post pages. Why not use it on the main blog pages as well? I'm assuming because the blog pages are always changing with different content there is not much point? Paginated pages in the category sections i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1?page=2 are noindexed but paginated pages in the main blog section i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog?page=2 are not. Is this because of a duplicate content concern since the posts in the category sections are in the main blog section as well? If that's the case, why wouldn't the main category page i.e.http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1 be noindexed as well? What's the reason for noindexing the "Show # Posts" pages i.e.http://www.seomoz.org/blog?show=5 ? I'm assuming another concern of duplicate content? Any insights into these questions would be greatly appreciated and would help with the implementation of our clients blog. Thanks, Ken
Technical SEO | | noBulMedia0 -
SEOMOZ is giving me back warning on my site that I cant seem to find.
It says I have too many hyperlinks on almost all my blog posts, but some of them don't even have a single hyperlink? What should I do?
Technical SEO | | Caseman0 -
Google Crawler Error / restricting crawling
Hi On a Magento Instance we manage there is an advanced search. As part of the ongoing enhancement of the instance we altered the advance search options so there are less and more relevant. The issue is Google has crawled and catalogued the advanced search with the now removed options in the query string. Google keeps crawling these out of date advanced searches. These stale searches now create a 500 error. Currently Google is attempting to crawl these pages twice a day. I have implemented the following to stop this:- 1. Submitted requested the url be removed via Webmaster tools, selecting the directory option using uri: http://www.domian.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/ 2. Added Disallow to robots.txt Disallow: /catalogsearch/advanced/result/* Disallow: /catalogsearch/advanced/result/ 3. Add rel="nofollow" to the links in the site linking to the advanced search. Below is a list of the links it is crawling or attempting to crawl, 12 links crawled twice a day each resulting in a 500 status. Can anything else be done? http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=94&category=55&color_layered=128&csize[0]=0&fabric=92&inventry_status=97&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=115&category=55&color_layered=130&csize[0]=0&fabric=0&inventry_status=97&length=116&price=3%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=94&category=55&color_layered=126&csize[0]=0&fabric=92&inventry_status=97&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=137&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=8%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=142&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=4%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=137&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=142&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=135&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=128&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=127&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=4%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=127&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=3%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=128&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=10%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=122&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=8%2C10
Technical SEO | | Flipmedia1120 -
How do you add a description to the Meta Description area to Tag Pages in Wordpress? This way I do not get the errors: "Missing Meta Description Tag" from SEOMoz Bot? Thanks!
I tried to add descriptions to my tags in Wordpress (well actually one to test), but I still keep getting the "Missing Meta Description Tag" error. Any suggestions on how to fix this in Wordpress? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jhblogger0
