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
-
My Ave. position and ranking is dropping!
Hi, I added canonicals last two days, and made a tiny change is our meta titles. (adding a secondary keyword). Now my ave. position and visibility has dropped very much. Can it be canonicals or is it the keywords? Can canonicals affect the website so quickly? My other question is can it be temporarily so should I wait more? how long? I should mention that our website content is not really good and I'm working on it. When I added meta tags we had a big jump in our ranking and then we stopped getting better,. But now we are going down! Can it be the content? Sorry I know that it is actually all, but i do not know which one matters more and do not understand why it happened immediately after adding canonicals. Our website is: www.pacificsmoke.com Appreciate your advice.
Technical SEO | | PSI.Account0 -
GWT False Reporting or GoogleBot has weird crawling ability?
Hi I hope someone can help me. I have launched a new website and trying hard to make everything perfect. I have been using Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) to ensure everything is as it should be but the crawl errors being reported do not match my site. I mark them as fixed and then check again the next day and it reports the same or similar errors again the next day. Example: http://www.mydomain.com/category/article/ (this would be a correct structure for the site). GWT reports: http://www.mydomain.com/category/article/category/article/ 404 (It does not exist, never has and never will) I have been to the pages listed to be linking to this page and it does not have the links in this manner. I have checked the page source code and all links from the given pages are correct structure and it is impossible to replicate this type of crawl. This happens accross most of the site, I have a few hundred pages all ending in a trailing slash and most pages of the site are reported in this manner making it look like I have close to 1000, 404 errors when I am not able to replicate this crawl using many different methods. The site is using a htacess file with redirects and a rewrite condition. Rewrite Condition: Need to redirect when no trailing slash RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
Technical SEO | | baldnut
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !.(html|shtml)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ /$1/ [L,R=301] The above condition forces the trailing slash on folders. Then we are using redirects in this manner: Redirect 301 /article.html http://www.domain.com/article/ In addition to the above we had a development site whilst I was building the new site which was http://dev.slimandsave.co.uk now this had been spidered without my knowledge until it was too late. So when I put the site live I left the development domain in place (http://dev.domain.com) and redirected it like so: <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^ - [E=protossl]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteRule ^ - [E=protossl:s] RewriteRule ^ http%{ENV:protossl}://www.domain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]</ifmodule> Is there anything that I have done that would cause this type of redirect 'loop' ? Any help greatly appreciated.\0 -
Will what happen to raven happen to SEOMoz?
With this new update coming out with raven marketing with this SEO Moz have to do the same update? Are is this something that Raven does and SEOMoz doesnt do with getting 3 rd party info?
Technical SEO | | MarketMotiveStudents0 -
Have a client that migrated their site; went live with noindex/nofollow and for last two SEOMoz crawls only getting one page crawled. In contrast, G.A. is crawling all pages. Just wait?
Client site is 15 + pages. New site had noindex/nofollow removed prior to last two crawls.
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
The 'On Page' section of SEOMOZ
How does SEOMOZ choose a keyword for a page, for example it has ranked one of my pages for a search term which does not really appear on that page and then given it an F - how do I change the key word association? Secondly, when I first started using SEOMOZ I could change the page and then click the button 'Grade my on-page optimization' and it would show an immediate update - does anyone know why this has been stopped, as it is very useful to know you have got the page right away to an A for example.
Technical SEO | | bowravenseo0 -
I am using SEOmoz pro software and my blog tags are bringing up 404 errors.
After checking they do bring back a 404 page, so i am wondering what to do. Do i remove all the blog tags? We use a Drupal cms system.
Technical SEO | | AITLtd0 -
How can I prevent sh404SEF Anti-flood control from blocking SEOMoz?
I'm using sh404SEF on my Joomla 1.5 website. Last week, I activated the security functions of the tool, which includes an anti-flood control feature. This morning when I looked at my new crawl statistics in SEOMoz, I noticed a significant drop in the number of webpages crawled, and I'm attributing that to the security configurations that I made earlier in the week. I'm looking for a way to prevent this from happening so the next crawl is accurate. I was thinking of using sh404SEFs "UserAgent white list" feature. Does SEOMoz have a UserAgent string that I could try adding to my white list? Is this what you guys recommend as a solution to this problem?
Technical SEO | | JBradySD0
