404 and Duplicate Content.
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I just submitted my first campaign. And it's coming up with a LOT of errors. Many of them I feel are out of my control as we use a CMS for RV dealerships.
But I have a couple of questions.
I got a 404 error and SEO Moz tells me the link, but won't tell me where that link originated from, so I don't know where to go to fix it.
I also got a lot of duplicate content, and it seems a lot of them are coming from "tags" on my blog. Is that something I should be concerned about?
I will have a lot more question probably as I'm new to using this tool Thanks for the responses!
-Brandon
here is my site: floridaoutdoorsrv.com
I welcome any advice or input!
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There should be more information there. Mind sending an email to help@seomoz.org? We'll help you figure it out from that end. Thanks!
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Okay, I did that. And only one of them had a URL. One had nothing and the other had a Keyword. Any ideas?
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Hi Brandon,
It should tell you -- scroll over to the referral column. There's more information in this help hub page at http://www.seomoz.org/help/fixing-crawl-diagnostic-issues
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Okay actually I did down load it, and it didn't tell me. It only tells me the link that is bad, not where it came from.
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I'm not sure I have that kind of control. It's a sort of a Closed CMS system with RV dealerships.Though SEO moz did find almost 9,000 rel=canonical. So I think they are being used.
I'm a little concerned because I have like close to 4,000 errors. But since it is a "E commerce" site I wonder if the backend is making some problems.
The two big ones are Duplicate Content and Duplicate Title tags. I try to make the content unique, but there must still be a lot of content I haven't switched over. I'm not entirely sure what my next step should be.
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Thanks! That's the answer I think I need!
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Also, if you use the CSV of your errors, SEOmoz will tell you where those 404s came from too.
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I forgot to address your question about duplicate content. Are you using canonical tags in your blog? If you place a rel=canonical tag on each of your blog pages with the full URL of the page you want to be viewed as the source of the original content, this should solve the duplicate content problem. If you already have tags in place then you may have another issue. If you are using canonical tags, you may want to go through and make sure they don't all look like this:
The tags should be specific to each page. This may be somethingyou've already done, and I might be explaining
in a way that's too basic. If so, I apologize. Just trying to makesure you're covered!
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Hi Brandon,
If your site is connected to Google Webmaster Tools, you can find out what page is the source of the link producing the 404. This can be done by logging into your GWT dashboard, clicking Site Health then click on "Crawl Errors" and then click on the "Not Found" tab. You will see a list of links producing 404 errors. Click on the link you want to investigate and you'll get a pop open window with more info. You will see three tabs "Error details," "In sitemaps," and "Linked from." Click linked from and you'll see the information you are wanting.
If you are not connected to Google Webmaster Tools yet, the process is fairly simple, even if you have limited access to your site. There are several ways to load your site into GWT and verify ownership, including simply installing a meta tag, or uploading a simple file to your root directory. GWT offers a wealth of information that can be a great supplement to the info you get from SEOMoz.
I hope this helps!
Dana
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