Is Moz Bot Broken?
-
Moz Bot says I have millions of issues with duplicate content.
One item says that it has over 50 duplicates! I downloaded the CSV it gave me to look into it.
All of my products have many different ways to get them, so I've set up rel=canonicals for the master one. So, I'd assume Mozbot would ignore those.
But the interesting thing I've found is that of these 50 duplicates, some of them (on the same CSV I downloaded) are completely different products, with completely different URL's. and completely different titles and completely different meta descriptions and completely different product descriptions.
So, 3 questions:
-
Is Moz bot broken?
-
Does it not recognize canonicals?
-
Why is it seeing 3 very different products as exactly the same product?
I'm so confused and since I work for a national company, the only way I can give actual examples is through a private message session. I guess I'm wondering if anyone else has come across this issue? Because I'm completely baffled.
-
-
Hello David,
Thanks for the response. I was able to receive a response in Chat yesterday that was very similar. All of the different URL's for the same product were pointing to the same canonical (the right one), so I was highly confused. Knowing that it's about Source Code helps a lot. Giant ecommerce sites like the one I'm working for it seems would have this issue more than smaller, boutique sites.
All of the products have their own unique product descriptions and titles & meta descriptions. So, for our brand, it is about the source code. I can suggest that the writers add more copy to their descriptions, but I can't imagine that will be a fun conversation.
I really appreciate the thoughtful answer to my question. Thanks so much!
-
Hello!
Our campaigns have 90% tolerance for duplicate content so this means if the page source code is at least 90% similar, it will be flagged.
Canonicals will only work if all pages that are truly identical each point to the same canonical URL
So if you have something like www.domain.com/productA/ as the primary URL for a single product
All 3 URLs below need to point to "www.domain.com/productA/" as the canonical
www.domain.com/productA/color=blue
www.domain.com/productA/category/tag
www.domain.com/productA/page1For another product www.domain/productB/
These will always report as a duplicate of productA if there isn't enough unique content to prevent them from being too similar due to the layout/template making up the majority of the source code.
For pages that are completely targeting separate products, those cannot be ignored so it will help to add more unique content to those pages to prevent getting flagged.
Here is a great article on how you can address duplicates for a site like yours: www.goinflow.com/duplicate-content-ecommerce-seo/
Hope this 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
-
MOZ Extension is not Working Properly
I'm using MOZ BAR extension on Chrome. It's not working properly on this WEBSITE. Can anyone tell me that is it an issue with this particular site or there is an issue in MOZ BAR. Furthermore, I have to logout and re-login every 30 minutes in order to see results. Thanks in Anticipation
Moz Bar | | yenahi85641 -
Why isn't the Moz crawler getting all of my item pages?
I am stumped and Moz is being terrible to work with. This site has about 40k pages 39,800 of them are item pages roughly. Moz is only finding about 2400 of my pages. So they are missing most but not all of my item pages. I do not know which item pages they are missing. The fact that they are finding about 2k but not the rest leads me to believe the crawler is struggling with pagination. The site is built on Magento 2 and uses the Amasty Layered Navigation extension. Does anyone have any ideas?
Moz Bar | | Tylerj0 -
Is Moz going to provide mobile ranking tools?
With the mobilegeddon update quickly approaching us on April 21, I wanted to know if Moz is going to provide any insight into mobile rankings vs. desktop rankings? Are there any other tools we can use to benchmark and gain insight into this kind of data?
Moz Bar | | jgrammer2 -
500 errors showing up differently on moz and google wmt
Lately, I've been having the issue of a large increase in 500 errors. These errors seem to be intermittent, in other words, Google and Moz are showing that I have server 500 errors for many pages but, when I actually check the links, everything's fine. I've run tests to see if there is any virus on the server or if I have any corrupt files and as far as I can tell, there are none. I'm left with the possibility that maybe one of my plugins is causing this issue (I'm built on top of Wordpress). Moz is showing that I had nearly five hundred 500 server errors on the 12th or the 11th. On the other hand, Google shows that on the 13th I had 179 server errors and then an additional 200 for the 15th. I'm assuming Google is slow to find or report these things? I would like to know which is more reliable so that I can try to figure out which of these plugins may be causing the problem, if any or if I'm investigating this the wrong way, I'd love to have more suggestions. Thanks in advance! Sorry, the url is http://www.heartspm.com if you'd like to take a look.
Moz Bar | | GerryWeitz0 -
Time out writing responses to Moz Q&A
This is driving me crazy and making me wish to destroy everything I can reach with my hands. I like to write long curated answers to people questions on here. And evidently there's some sort of timeouts in Moz Q&A software. Because every time I answer to someone I get this fu#@!ng error message... http://imgur.com/ypVQ2hD So I go back, I lost everything and either give up or write one sentence. ypVQ2hD
Moz Bar | | max.favilli0 -
Why does the moz crawl test lists page twice?
Hi, I'm running into an issue where some crawlers list my pages twice, once with a trailing slash, once without. I first saw it on a few pages with screaming frog, then saw it happen on all my pages with the moz crawler. The site is www.kidsandart.org and its on Squarespace. I grepped the sitemap.xml I submitted to google webmaster and got 167 distinct pages, all of them without a trailing slash. Any insights on why this is happening, and how to regard moz crawler results would be appreciated. thanks Tom
Moz Bar | | tpushpathadam0 -
My product pages have no weight / links from root domains with the Moz tool bar
Hi, When I view my home page (http://www.arkwildlife.co.uk) with the Moz toolbar, I see a good PA and a good amount of links from root domains. As I go down the site, it seems to get worse. The category pages (http://www.arkwildlife.co.uk/Category/0/Straight_Foods.html) have a little but not much and then from this point onwards, it's nothing. The product page (http://www.arkwildlife.co.uk/Item/Straight_Foods~Sunflower_Seeds/SUNH/Premium_Sunflower_Hearts.html) is reporting to have no root domain links but I am not sure why. Interestingly, when I click through to a review page (http://www.arkwildlife.co.uk/StockReview/0/SUNH/0/Premium_Sunflower_Hearts.html) it does have some juice. Would anyone be able help on why this is happening and what I need to be looking at in order to resolve it please? EDIT: I've been looking at the hyperlinks and notice something odd. If I review the score with the first link below, it gives a score of 1, but the second gives a PA of 13 with one root domain linked. 1:http://www.arkwildlife.co.uk/Item/Straight_Foods~Sunflower_Seeds/SUNH/Premium_Sunflower_Hearts.html 2:http://www.arkwildlife.co.uk/Item/Straight_Foods%7ESunflower_Seeds/SUNH/Premium_Sunflower_Hearts.html Please note the "%7E" instead of the "~" in the URL. The browser appears to show the ~ character no matter what but the rank of the page changes. I don't understand what the Moz toolbar is doing with this. Note: This behaviour only happens in Mozilla Firefox, in chrome both the rankings are zero for each URL. Many Thanks.
Moz Bar | | nawgie0 -
Moz just did my weekly "crawl" and claims my meta titles and descriptions are "missing," but they aren't. What's up with this?
I can check for my titles and descriptions in the source. They are there, always have been. what in the hell?
Moz Bar | | LifeisRosie0