How do crawl errors from SEOmoz tool set effect rankings?
-
Hello -
The other day I presented the crawl diagnostic report to a client. We identified duplicate page title errors, missing meta description errors, and duplicate content errors.
After reviewing the report we presented it to the clients web company who operates a closed source CMS. Their response was that these errors are not worthy of fixing and in fact they are not hurting the site.
We are having issues getting the errors fixed and I would like your opinion on this matter.
My question is, how bad are these errors? Should we not fix them? Should they be fixed? Will fixing the errors have an impact on our site's rankings?
Personally, I think the question is silly. I mean, the errors were found using the SEOmoz tool kit, these errors have to be effecting SEO.....right?
The attached image is the result of the Crawl Diagnostics that crawled 1,400 pages.
NOTE: Most of the errors are coming from Pages like
blog/archive/2011-07/page-2
/blog/category/xxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxxx/page-2
testimonials/147/xxxxx--xxxxx
(xxxx represents information unique to the client)
Thanks for your insight!
-
Ultimately, the client is paying you for SEO advice, you are providing advice and they are not acting upon it. Explain to them that whilst non of these issues are massive factors, to be able to provide the best possible advice you need to remove the common errors and be working from a solid standpoint.
I like the quality metric - if a site has these daft problems, then it's quality is lower and it's chance of hitting a threshold for a problem is more likely. If the duplication of pages / titles becomes rampant, then we get closer to a panda type problem.
Simply put, to rank as well as possible, we do everything we can and taking care of the smaller details is an important part of this job so you can do your job properly knowing you are not being held back by simple, easy to fix issues.
-
Hi Gabriel,
i believe that Google can handle missing meta descriptions relatively well and will read the page content to create one, however you will miss out on personalizing them to boost click through rates.
I would prioritize fixing the duplicated page titles and content over everything else, even then i don't believe it will make a huge difference as i removed about 2000 errors and warnings from my site a while back and i haven't seen a huge change in traffic or rankings.
Kyle
-
Thanks Cornel!
Trust me, I tried to send this guy all the links that I could find. They keep saying, "Look at our rankings under this keyword....we don't need to fix the errors, you can rank with them."
What do you think? How important are the duplicate title & missing meta description errors? Is this a top priority thing? Or, is it ok to let them slide.
Of course my view is to fix them. I think BING penalizes for on page errors more thanGoogle does.
Thoughts?
Gabriel
-
Just send your client this:
1. Missing Meta Description
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description
http://www.highrankings.com/metadescription
2. Duplicate Page Title
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag
3. Title Element too Long
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/long-title-tags
4. To many On-Page Links
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769
5. Duplicate Page Content
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359
6. Long URL
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo
http://www.johnfdoherty.com/lessons-from-google-about-url-lengths/
7. Title Missing or Empty
http://searchengineland.com/seotable
By the time they finish reading this hey will not argue anymore.
Cornel
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
-
Company name ranking
Hi all, I hope somebody can share their thoughts on the below. A web designer launched my client's new website and I have been tasked with the SEO. I was approached with an immediate problem, www.clientswebsite.co.uk was ranking 9th for their company name after being indexed by Google. The search results above www.clientswebsite.co.uk were related to my client but not all, for example a direct competitor was also ranking. I have been working on the SEO for 2-3 weeks and I just managed to get to 3rd position for the company name, and then www.clientswebsite.co.uk disappeared from page 1! And now instead, an irelevant sub page is now ranking for the company name on page 2 (a contact page). I have checked and the home page is still indexed (did a site: check). The only problem software picks up is a redirect chain (http://homepage -> http://www.homepage -> https://homepage) the web developers said it wouldn't impact rankings (when I asked them to edit the htaccess file to fix it) I've listed below the SEO tasks I completed whilst attempting to rank the company name: I set up analytics and webmaster tools, in which I set up preferred domain (www) Added a sitemap Edited meta data making sure company name was included I contacted the websites above www.clientswebsite.co.uk that were relevant and asked them to place a link linking to their new website, I was successful with a couple of these. I placed www.clientswebsite.co.uk on all of their social media profiles I reformatted headers on their home page, making sure the H1 included my client's company name I found 2 extra versions of my client's home page (not exact copies, but very similar content) that had been published, so I decided to 301 redirect these to the correct home page Activated SSL and forced to HTTPS I would really appreciate it if anyone could share their thoughts here, whether it be explanations or possible solutions Adam
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
Unknown Subdomains Ranking
In spot checking some pages that I recently launched, I found subdomains ranking in place of the domain. The strange thing is, we never set up these sub-domains and they don't exist on our server. The pages, though they're indexed with the proper title and meta-description, time out when clicked. We're operating on Drupal 7, pages launched at the beginning of the month. The other pages within the series of content are ranking properly. Any thoughts or tips to resolve this?
Technical SEO | | JordanNCU1 -
Www vs non www - Crawl Error 902
I have just taken over admin of my company website and I have been confronted with crawl error 902 on the existing campaign that has been running for years in Moz. This seems like an intermittent problem. I have searched and tried to go over many of the other solutions and non of them seem to help. The campaign is currently set-up with the url http://companywebsite.co.uk when I tried to do a Moz manual crawl using this URL I got an error message. I changed the link to crawl to http://www.companywebsite.co.uk and the crawl went off without a hitch and im currently waiting on the results. From testing I now know that if i go to the non-www version of my companies website then nothing happens it never loads. But if I go to the www version then it loads right away. I know for SEO you only want 1 of these URLS so you dont have duplicate content. But i thought the non-www should redirect to the www version. Not just be completely missing. I tried to set-up a new campaign with the defaults URL being the www version but Moz automatically changed it to the non-www version. It seems a cannot set up a new campaign with it automatically crawling the www version. Does it sound like im out the right path to finding this cause? Or can somebody else offer up a solution? Many thanks,
Technical SEO | | ATP
Ben .0 -
Responsive web design has a crawl error of redirecting to HTTP instead of HTTPS ? is this because of the new update of google that appreciates the HTTPs more?
We at yamsafer.me are using a Repsonsive web design! A crawl errors occured which redirects the hompage to an HTTP version instead of HTTPS? Any ideas on why this happened?
Technical SEO | | Yamsafer.com0 -
Malware ranking drops
Hi, One of our sites got hit with malware in November. We cleaned it up and sent a reconsideration request and no malware warnings are in WMT anymore. We still haven't seen an improvement in rankings even though people say it can take up to 90days? Organic traffic is down 40% and still dropping. Any advice? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Does it really matter to set 301 redirect for not found error pages?
I've very simple question for not found error pages. Does it really require to set up 301 redirect for all not found error pages which detected in Google webmaster tools? Honestly, I don't want to set 301 redirect exclude externally connected pages. So, what will impact on ranking after follow this process?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Rankings plummeted... whhhaaaa!
Hey all, I just came on as the SEO Specialist for an Ecommerce site a few months ago and have been working quite hard on getting things in order with the site's architecture, dup content, backlinking etc. Last week we made the move from 3 subdomains of a top level domain to subdirectories as the content/products are too much alike to be running subdomains. The way it's working now is when a request comes in to the old subdomain, the redirect to the subdirectory is happening at the htaccess file with a permanent 301. That said, I got our SEOmoz ranking report today and we have plummeted all over the place keyword ranking wise. I am quite sure that it's due to the change in architecture that happened last week... but what do you all think? I would be appreciative of any advice or thoughts from the SEOmoz community. Much thanks!
Technical SEO | | Punkaj0 -
Subdomain and Domain Rankings
I have read here that domain names with keywords might add a boost to your search rank For instance using a completely inane example monkey-fights.com might get a boost compared to mfl.com (monkey fighting league) when searching for "monkey fights" There seems to be a hot debate as to how much bonus the first domain might get over the second, but leaving that aside for the moment. Question 1. Would monkey-fights.mfl.com get the same kind of bonus as a root domain bonus? Question 2. If the answer to 1 above was yes would a 301 redirect from the suddomain URL to root domain URL retain that bonus I was just thinking on how hard it is to get root domains these days that are not either being squatted on etc. and if this might be a way to get the same bonus, or maybe subdomains are less bonus prone and so it would be a waste of time Thanks
Technical SEO | | bThere0