Has any on else experienced a spike in crawl errors?
-
Hi,
Since the last time our sites were crawled in SEOmoz they are all showing a spike in Errors. (Mainly duplicate page titles and duplicate content).
We haven't changed anything to the structure of the sites but they are all using the same content management system.
The image is an example of what we are witnessing for all our sites based on the same system.
Is anyone else experiencing anything similar? or does anyone know of any changes that SEOmoz has implemented which may be affecting this?
Anthony.
-
Thanks for all your replies.
We haven't changed anything on any of the sites. We use our own CMS which has not changed either.
Webmaster tools doesn't show the same errors as SEOMoz.
We appear to be in the same situation as Mike. We know that we have duplicate titles and content but we have taken care of our duplicate issues using canonical and no index tags, which drastically reduced our errors. For some reason SEOmoz doesn't seem to have paid heed to them on it's latest crawl.
Thanks Mike. At least we are not on our own.
Maybe I should see if this is rectified after the next SEOMoz crawl before I pursue this any further?
-
This leads me to a problem then. As per Dave (the author of the article), "using canonical tags will result in duplicate errors being suppressed. If one page refers to another as a duplicate, than that pair will not be reported as duplicates. Also, if two pages both refer to the same third page as their canonical, then they will not be reported as duplicates of each other, either."
But now that this change has gone into effect I have 2000+ more duplicate content errors appearing and they are all pages with rel="canonical" pointing to the original page. So, as he stated earlier in the post this has caused "the most negative customer experience we anticipate: having a behind-the-scenes change of our duplicate detection heuristic causing a sudden rash of incorrect "duplicate page" errors to appear for no apparent good reason."
Is this something that will eventually correct itself or is this something that will need tweaking of the new detection method?
-
We did change the way we detected duplicate content earlier this month. Here's a blog post about it at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/visualizing-duplicate-web-pages.
Hope this helps explain things for you! Let me know if you have any more questions.
-
I saw a huge spike after the last crawl. In my case, the canonicals we set on our site months ago to handle some duplicate content issues appear not to be seen by Seomoz's crawl. Though when I check for duplicate title & meta issues in Webmaster Tools I don't see the offending pages that SEOMoz is showing me. That leads me to believe something is happening with either how the SEOMoz system is reporting or how their bot is crawling.
-
What CMS are you using?
Did you add any menus to your home or sub-pages (ie footer menus or anything like that?)
Have you gone into the Errors and see what pages are being duplicated?
Have you implemented rel=canonical on the pages?
Is your CMS creating Titles for you or are they manually created?
Have you checked WMT to see if the duplicate issue is there too? (under html improvements)
-
No spikes in either of our campaigns.
You said that yours were related to duplicate page titles / content which likely means your CMS is generating duplicate pages. Could be related to reviews, sorting, comments etc..
Have had a chance to research the errors and see if those pages actually exist? We had an issue with Oscommerce and page sorting causing this same problem, we fixed it by implementing rel canonical tags.
Hope that helps
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
-
50,000 4xx errors listed in MOZ report :(
HI, I've just had a look at a customers MOZ report and discovered nearly 50,000 errors listed!! The site is a non dynamic, non database driven site so where these have come from is beyond me. Example - (Both links open in a new window)
Moz Pro | | Skips
LIVE PAGE - http://lunnonwaste.com/licenses/Heatherland-Limited-H&S-Policy-Document-JAN-15.pdf
NON EXISTANT PAGE - http://lunnonwaste.com/licenses/licenses/Heatherland-Limited-H&S-Policy-Document-JAN-15.pdf - if you hover over any links you'll see they're ALL ......./licenses/licenses/.......... which doesn't exist! It's the file system that seems to be the problem - .........../licenses/licenses/........... and this gets added onto (............./licenses/licenses/licenses/licenses/.............. , up to the 50,000 page errors LOL The problem is self replicating. It's very odd and not something I've ever seen before, NON of these 'extra' pages are listed on the server, so where are they coming from? Any suggestions or help would be gratefully appreciated1 -
Is it normal for Moz to report on nofollow pages in crawl diagnostics?
I have a dev version of my website, for example, devwww.website.com. The htaccess page has a noindex and nofollow request, but I got crawl issues reported from these pages in my Moz report. Does this mean that I don't have the development site hidden from search like I thought I did?
Moz Pro | | houstonbrooke0 -
What is error message:social_account.no_method?
When trying to add a twitter account to track, I received the following error message:social_account.no_method - has anyone else received this message?
Moz Pro | | solutionbuilt.com0 -
I did a redirect and now I'm getting duplication errors.
I was told by SEO Moz to do a redirect so that our website would be crawled with and without the www in front of the address. I did and now I'm getting duplicate page and title errors because the crawler is seeing www.oursitename.com and its underpages and oursitename.com and its underpages and giving me duplicate page content errors and duplicate page title errors. Makes sense, but how do I make it stop? Anyone else have this problem?
Moz Pro | | THMCC0 -
Crawl Diagnostics - Canonical Question
On one of my sites I have 61 notices for Rel Canonical. Is it bad to have these or is this just something that's informative?
Moz Pro | | kadesmith0 -
How to resolve Duplicate Content crawl errors for Magento Login Page
I am using the Magento shopping cart, and 99% of my duplicate content errors come from the login page. The URL looks like: http://www.site.com/customer/account/login/referer/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5tbW1zcGVjaW9zYS5jb20vcmV2aWV3L3Byb2R1Y3QvbGlzdC9pZC8xOTYvY2F0ZWdvcnkvNC8jcmV2aWV3LWZvcm0%2C/ Or, the same url but with the long string different from the one above. This link is available at the top of every page in my site, but I have made sure to add "rel=nofollow" as an attribute to the link in every case (it is done easily by modifying the header links template). Is there something else I should be doing? Do I need to try to add canonical to the login page? If so, does anyone know how to do it using XML?
Moz Pro | | kdl01 -
Urgent: Campaign set up 'Select Competitors' errors
Hi. Im setting up my first campaign and Im having issues with step 3: 'Select your competitors to track'. I only want to track 1 competitor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Murphy_(writer) When I enter this and the competitor name into the form provided and click 'continue to next step' it throws an error at me: Darn, there are errors in your form! Don’t worry, Roger can’t feel pain. Competitors domain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ryan_murphy_(writer) may not have a /path after the host Domain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ryan_murphy_(writer) may not have a /path after the host Can anyone help me as this is urgent.
Moz Pro | | RyanSMurphy1 -
How can I clean up my crawl report from duplicate records?
I am viewing my Crawl Diagnostics Report. My report is filled with data which really shouldn't be there. For example I have a page: http://www.terapvp.com/forums/Ghost/ This is a main forum page. It contains a list of many threads. The list can be sorted on many values. The page is canonicalized, and has been since it was created. My crawl report shows this page listed 15 times. http://www.terapvp.com/forums/Ghost/?direction=asc http://www.terapvp.com/forums/Ghost/?direction=desc http://www.terapvp.com/forums/Ghost/?order=post_date and so forth. Each of those pages uses the same canonicalization reference shared above. I have three questions: Why is this data appearing in my crawl report? These pages are properly canonicalized. If these pages are supposed to appear in the report for some reason, how can I remove them? My desire is to focus on any pages which may have an issue which needs to be addressed. This site has about 50 forum pages and when you add an extra 15 pages per forum, it becomes a lot harder to locate actionable data. To make matters worse, these forum indexes often have many pages. So if I have a "Corvette" forum there that is 10 pages long, then there will be 150 extra pages just for that particular forum in my crawl report. Is there anything I am missing? To the best of my knowledge everything is set up according to the best SEO practices. If there is any other opinions, I would like to hear them.
Moz Pro | | RyanKent0