Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • Case Studies
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      What is your Brand Authority?
      Moz

      What is your Brand Authority?

      Check yours now
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • SEO Q&A

        Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • Case Studies

        Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. Moz Tools
    3. Moz Pro
    4. Crawlers crawl weird long urls

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Crawlers crawl weird long urls

    Moz Pro
    3
    14
    2328
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • r.nijkamp
      r.nijkamp last edited by

      I did a crawl start for the first time and i get many errors, but the weird fact is that the crawler tracks duplicate long, not existing urls.

      For example (to be clear):

      there is a page: www.website.com/dogs/dog.html

      but then it is continuing crawling:
      www.website.com/dogs/dog.html
      www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dog.html
      www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
      www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
      www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html

      what can I do about this? Screaming Frog gave me the same issue, so I know it's something with my website

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • r.nijkamp
        r.nijkamp last edited by

        Answer from Screaming Frog!

        The reason the SEO spider is crawling these URLs, is due to incorrect relative linking on the site from the login URL.
        It's actually when the spider crawls the login page, http://www.website.com/login?returnurl=%2F which then leads to this URL http://www.website.com/Home/ctl/SendPassword?returnurl=http:/www.website.com/ and then this /home/ sub directory URL http://www.website.com/Home/ctl/page/dogs.aspx which links to http://www.website.com/Home/ctl/page/page/dogs.aspx and so on and so forth. This is the path to the incorrect relative linking (attached for you).

        To stop this, you can correct the incorrect relative linking, or easier, simply exclude the login page.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • r.nijkamp
          r.nijkamp last edited by

          Wow, Big mistakes are made one Home

          maybe because of the .aspx. extension? alle pages have seo-friendly urls

          Thanks Wesley and Paddy Displays

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • WesleySmits
            WesleySmits last edited by

            I see a link to http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/OverOdin/HeutinkICT.aspx from http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/ReindersICT.aspx.

            It's the bottom left block which causes this link. This way you will get a big nesting effect.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
            • PaddyDisplays
              PaddyDisplays @PaddyDisplays last edited by

              OK found one problem

              on this page

              http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/ReindersICT.aspx

              you have a link to

              http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/OverOdin/LesscherIT.aspx

              which i think should be

              http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/LesscherIT.aspx

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
              • PaddyDisplays
                PaddyDisplays last edited by

                ok I did a quick screaming fog and I think I have an idea, you just have to follow the breadcrumbs

                You said in you example "In Links 9", you need to find out what those pages are and follow it back to the point of origin As I think its just one bad link that cause this nested link effect.

                eg

                http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/OverOdin/OverOdin/OverOdin/HeutinkICT.aspx

                is being linked from

                http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/OverOdin/OverOdin/StationtoStation.aspx  (as well as others)

                You just have to follow that trail till you find the source of the problem

                PaddyDisplays 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • r.nijkamp
                  r.nijkamp @WesleySmits last edited by

                  every link, except the hompage itself

                  bugurl.png

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • r.nijkamp
                    r.nijkamp @PaddyDisplays last edited by

                    I can't see any source:

                    The pages are like:

                    | URL | www.website.com/page/ |
                    | Status Code | 200 |
                    | Status | OK |
                    | Type | text/html; charset=utf-8 |
                    | Size | 55811 |
                    | Title |   |
                    | Level | 10 |
                    | In Links | 9 |
                    | Out Links | 38 |

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • WesleySmits
                      WesleySmits @r.nijkamp last edited by

                      Which URL(s) is/are causing problems?

                      r.nijkamp 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • r.nijkamp
                        r.nijkamp @WesleySmits last edited by

                        please be free to check: http://tinyurl.com/lox7le9

                        WesleySmits 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • WesleySmits
                          WesleySmits @r.nijkamp last edited by

                          You don't necessarily have to remove the link. As long as you can verify that it directs to the right page.

                          But curious to see what caused the problem 🙂

                          r.nijkamp 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                          • PaddyDisplays
                            PaddyDisplays last edited by

                            I think Screaming Frog will tell you the page it found the weird url, then you can check the source, and find out whats producing that link.

                            r.nijkamp 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                            • r.nijkamp
                              r.nijkamp last edited by

                              That is a good one! It's true that I have the same linking to the page itself. I will remove all that kind of links first and crawl again. I'll keep you in touch!

                              WesleySmits 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • WesleySmits
                                WesleySmits last edited by

                                Are you somehow linking to www.website.com/dogs/dog.html from the page itself? There could be something wrong with that link.
                                I made a small mistake not so long ago with a redirection plugin. I told it to go to domain.com. This plugin was looking at the base + what i told it to. So it went to: domain.com/domain.com. Perhaps you made a similar mistake.

                                Maybe you can send me the URL and i can take a look at it?

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                • 1 / 1
                                • First post
                                  Last post

                                Got a burning SEO question?

                                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                                Start my free trial


                                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.

                                • See all categories

                                Related Questions

                                • Smarter_Finances

                                  How Long Do The Link Tracking Lists Take To Update?

                                  Hi, How long do the link tracking lists take to update? It's been over a week and each is still showing a red cross. The reason I created it was because I migrated to a new domain name and Moz is still showing the backlinks on the old property and not the new (the domain swap happened in December 2020). I can see that Ahrefs has picked up all of the links - Both new and redirected - but Moz has not. When will this be reflected in Moz as it has already been over three months? Is there a reason for the above questions? I appreciate any response here. 🙂

                                  Moz Pro | | Smarter_Finances
                                  3
                                • Cart_generation

                                  URL Length Issue

                                  MOZ is telling me the URLs are too long. I did a little research and I found out that the length of the URLs is not really a serious problem. In fact, others recommend ignoring the situation. Even on their blog I found this explanation: "Shorter URLs are generally preferable. You do not need to take this to the extreme, and if your URL is already less than 50-60 characters, do not worry about it at all. But if you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there's probably an opportunity to rewrite them and gain value. This is not a direct problem with Google or Bing - the search engines can process long URLs without much trouble. The issue, instead, lies with usability and user experience. Shorter URLs are easier to parse, copy and paste, share on social media, and embed, and while these may all add up to a fractional improvement in sharing or amplification, every tweet, like, share, pin, email, and link matters (either directly or, often, indirectly)." And yet, I have these questions: In this case, why do I get this error telling me that the urls are too long, and what are the best practices to get this out? Thank You

                                  Moz Pro | | Cart_generation
                                  1
                                • brunoe1

                                  Url-delimiter vs. SEO

                                  Hi all, Our customer is building a new homepage. Therefore, they use pages, which are generated out of a special module. Like a blog-page out of the blog-module (not only for blogs, also for lightboxes). For that, the programmer is using an url-delimiter for his url-parsing. The url-delimiter is for example a /b/ or /s/. The url would look like this: www.test.ch/de/blog/b/an-article www.test.ch/de/s/management-coaching Does the url-delimiter (/b/ or /s/ in the url) have a negative influence on SEO? Should we remove the /b/ or /s/ for a better seo-performance Thank you in advance for your feedback. Greetings. Samuel

                                  Moz Pro | | brunoe1
                                  0
                                • moshen

                                  404 Crawl Diagnostics with void(0) appended to URL

                                  Hello I am getting loads of 404 reported in my Crawl report, all appended with void(0) at the end.  For example: http://lfs.org.uk/films-and-filmmakers/watch-our-films/1289/void(0)
                                  The site is running on Drupal 7, Has anyone come across this before? Kind Regards Moshe | http://lfs.org.uk/films-and-filmmakers/watch-our-films/1289/void(0) |

                                  Moz Pro | | moshen
                                  0
                                • Blacktie

                                  Block Moz (or any other robot) from crawling pages with specific URLs

                                  Hello! Moz reports that my site has around 380 duplicate page content. Most of them come from dynamic generated URLs that have some specific parameters. I have sorted this out for Google in webmaster tools (the new Google Search Console) by blocking the pages with these parameters. However, Moz is still reporting the same amount of duplicate content pages and, to stop it, I know I must use robots.txt. The trick is that, I don't want to block every page, but just the pages with specific parameters. I want to do this because among these 380 pages there are some other pages with no parameters (or different parameters) that I need to take care of. Basically, I need to clean this list to be able to use the feature properly in the future. I have read through Moz forums and found a few topics related to this, but there is no clear answer on how to block only pages with specific URLs. Therefore, I have done my research and come up with these lines for robots.txt: User-agent: dotbot
                                  Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 User-agent: rogerbot
                                  Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 My questions: 1. Are the above lines correct and would block Moz (dotbot and rogerbot) from crawling only pages that have numberOfStars=0 parameter in their URLs, leaving other pages intact? 2. Do I need to have an empty line between the two groups? (I mean between "Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0" and "User-agent: rogerbot")? (or does it even matter?) I think this would help many people as there is no clear answer on how to block crawling only pages with specific URLs. Moreover, this should be valid for any robot out there. Thank you for your help!

                                  Moz Pro | | Blacktie
                                  0
                                • LabeliumUSA

                                  Special Characters in URL & Google Search Engine (Index & Crawl)

                                  G'd everyone, I need help with understanding how special characters impact SEO.  Eg. é , ë ô in words Does anyone have good insights or reference material regarding the treatment of Special Characters by Google Search Engine? how Page Title / Meta Desc with Special Chars are being index  & Crawl Best Practices when it comes to URLs - uses of Unicode, HTML entity references - when are where? any disadvantage using special characters Does special characters in URL have any impact on SEO performance & User search, experience. Thanks heaps, Amy

                                  Moz Pro | | LabeliumUSA
                                  0
                                • sfchronicle

                                  SEO Web Crawler IP addresses

                                  What are the IP addresses for the SEO Web Crawler? There is a firewall on my clients website before it goes live, I would like to crawl the site before it goes live, but need to provide the web crawlers IP addreses. Thank you for your time

                                  Moz Pro | | sfchronicle
                                  1
                                • Greg80

                                  Does anyone know what the %5C at the end of a URL is?

                                  I've just had a look at the crawl diagnostics and my site comes up with duplicate page content and duplicate titles. I noticed that the url all has %5C at the end which I've never seen before. Does anybody know what that means?

                                  Moz Pro | | Greg80
                                  0

                                Get started with Moz Pro!

                                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                                Start my free trial
                                Products
                                • Moz Pro
                                • Moz Local
                                • Moz API
                                • Moz Data
                                • STAT
                                • Product Updates
                                Moz Solutions
                                • SMB Solutions
                                • Agency Solutions
                                • Enterprise Solutions
                                Free SEO Tools
                                • Domain Authority Checker
                                • Link Explorer
                                • Keyword Explorer
                                • Competitive Research
                                • Brand Authority Checker
                                • MozBar Extension
                                • MozCast
                                Resources
                                • Blog
                                • SEO Learning Center
                                • Help Hub
                                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                                • How-to Guides
                                • Moz Academy
                                • API Docs
                                About Moz
                                • About
                                • Team
                                • Careers
                                • Contact
                                Why Moz
                                • Case Studies
                                • Testimonials
                                Get Involved
                                • Become an Affiliate
                                • MozCon
                                • Webinars
                                • Practical Marketer Series
                                • MozPod
                                Connect with us

                                Contact the Help team

                                Join our newsletter

                                Access all your tools in one place. Whether you're tracking progress or analyzing data, everything you need is at your fingertips.

                                Moz logo
                                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                                • Accessibility
                                • Terms of Use
                                • Privacy

                                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.