Site less than 20 pages shows 1,400+ pages when crawled
-
Hello! I’m new to SEO, and have been soaking up as much as I can. I really love it, and feel like it could be a great fit for me – I love the challenge of figuring out the SEO puzzle, plus I have a copywriting/PR background, so I feel like that would be perfect for helping businesses get a great jump on their online competition.
In fact, I was so excited about my newfound love of SEO that I offered to help a friend who owns a small business on his site. Once I started, though, I found myself hopelessly confused.
The problem comes when I crawl the site. It was designed in Wordpress, and is really not very big (part of my goal in working with him was to help him get some great content added!)
Even though there are only 11 pages – and 6 posts – for the entire site, when I use Screaming Frog to crawl it, it sees HUNDREDS of pages. It stops at 500, because that is the limit for their free version. In the campaign I started here at SEOmoz, and it says over 1,400 pages have been crawled…with something like 900 errors.
Not good, right?
So I've been trying to figure out the problem...when I look closer in Screaming Frog, I can see that some things are being repeated over and over. If I sort by the Title, the URLs look like they’re stuck in a loop somehow - one line will have /blog/category/postname…the next line will have /blog/category/category/postname…and the next line will have /blog/category/category/category/postname…and so on, with another /category/ added each time.
So, with that, I have two questions
- Does anyone know what the problem is, and how to fix it?
- Do professional SEO people troubleshoot this kind of stuff all of the time? Is this the best place to get answers to questions like that? And if not, where is?
Thanks so much in advance for your help! I’ve enjoyed reading all of the posts that are available here so far, it seems like a really excellent and helpful community...I'm looking forward to the day when I can actually answer the questions!!
-
Thanks, Irving! I am trying turning on/off the plugins - the person who designed the site used a WP Boxer plugin and Multiple Content Blocks plugin, and that is how the homepage is designed (feeding info from pages/posts) so I was wondering if that could be part of it...but when I turn them off/on that doesn't seem to help. So I'm trying the other plugins too (there are just a couple), and if that doesn't work, I'll try a fresh install!
I also tried changing the permalink structure to just /sample-post/ and that didn't seem to work either...but I'm going to keep working on it!
I haven't tried the Twitter approach yet - because I don't actually have a Twitter account (I'm trying to keep social media from taking over my life) - but if that's where the answers are, I guess I need to get on there!
-
Did you install plugins that might have caused the issue? I would deactivate all plugins and see if it has an effect then turn them on one at a time to see if you can isolate the issue.
If the plugins are not the issue, it might make sense to backup the DB and do a fresh install of WP which isn't hard.
-
I don't think the site moved hosts - I'm not the person who created it, but his business is relatively new, so if there was a change it would have been done with very little content on the site.
The permalink structure is custom and looks like this: /blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
Would something else be better? Let me know! Thanks!!
-
Hey K,
If you could post a screen shot of the Settings>Permalink structure screen in the Wordpress Dashboard, or just copy and paste whatever is written in there in a reply, that might help diagnose the issue. Also, do you know if the site has moved hosts recently and was re-installed using the Wordpress export & import feature?
-
Thanks, Alan! I'll try contacting those guys!
-
This is most likely a job for a WordPress programmer because it sounds like there's a major flaw in the site architecture. Andrew Norcross @Norcross on Twitter, and Joe Hall @JoeHall would be the two people I'd reach out to for guidance if it were me.
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
-
How long will old pages stay in Google's cache index. We have a new site that is two months old but we are seeing old pages even though we used 301 redirects.
Two months ago we launched a new website (same domain) and implemented 301 re-directs for all of the pages. Two months later we are still seeing old pages in Google's cache index. So how long should I tell the client this should take for them all to be removed in search?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Liamis0 -
Crawl Issue for Deleted Pages
Hi, sometimes, I just delete a page and not necessarily want to make a 404 to another page. So Google Webmaster Tools shows me 108 'not found' pages under 'Crawling Errors'. Is that a problem for my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal
Can I ignore this with good conscience?
Shall I make 404 to my homepage? I am confused and would like to hear your opinion on this. Best, Robin0 -
How Many Images on 1 Page Are Acceptable
Example I have a page with a slideshow of 35 pictures. They are all unique pictures and relevant to the page, have unique alt text, though no captions or description surrounding the images. Page also has a lot of unique written content. Question: is this large nr of pictures potentially overwhelming for search engines and they may think it is spammy and it would be a safer bet to only keep the top 10 pictures on such page? I did review this great whiteboard Friday - http://moz.com/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday - and I noticed this at very end: "The other part, and I see this happen a lot especially with bigger clients, is when you put lots and lots of images on one page, like an image gallery, those pages tend to be very hard to get indexed. The reason for that is there's not a lot unique textual content. A lot of times it's just overwhelming to users. It doesn't provide a lot of benefit in a search result." My page has been indexed, but will ranking potentially be hurt and to play it safe I better reduce nr of pictures? I do understand the "do what is best for the user" scenario and that is what I am doing with a lot of amazing original pictures not found on any other website. However, with search engines we obviously have to consider how they operate as well. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
How can I see all the pages google has indexed for my site?
Hi mozers, In WMT google says total indexed pages = 5080. If I do a site:domain.com commard it says 6080 results. But I've only got 2000 pages in my site that should be indexed. So I would like to see all the pages they have indexed so I can consider noindexing them or 404ing them. Many thanks, Julian.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julianhearn0 -
Too many on page links - product pages
Some of the pages on my client's website have too many on page links because they have lists of all their products. Is there anything I should/could do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
On-Site Optimization Tips for Job site?
I am working on a job site that only ranks well for the homepage with very low ranking internal pages. My job pages do not rank what so ever and are database driven and often times turn to 404 pages after the job has been filled. The job pages have to no content either. Anybody have any technical on-site recommendations for a job site I am working on especially regarding my internal pages? (Cross Country Allied.com) Any help would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Do in page links pointing to the parent page make the page more relevant for that term?
Here's a technical question. Suppose I have a page relevant to the term "Mobile Phones". I have a piece of text, on that page talking about "mobile phones", and within that text is the term "cell phones". Now if I link the text "cell phones", to the page it is already placed on (ie the parent page) - will the page gain more relevancy for the term "cell phones"?? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
Pages un-indexed in my site
My current website www.energyacuity.com has had most pages indexed for more than a year. However, I tried cache a few of the pages, and it looks the only one that is now indexed by Goggle is the homepage. Any thoughts on why this is happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abernatj0
