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
-
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.htmlwhat can I do about this? Screaming Frog gave me the same issue, so I know it's something with my website
-
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.
-
Wow, Big mistakes are made one Home
maybe because of the .aspx. extension? alle pages have seo-friendly urls
Thanks Wesley and Paddy Displays
-
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.
-
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
-
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
-
every link, except the hompage itself
-
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 | -
Which URL(s) is/are causing problems?
-
please be free to check: http://tinyurl.com/lox7le9
-
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
-
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.
-
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!
-
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?
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 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_Finances3 -
Difference between urls and referring urls?
Sorry, nit new to this side of SEO We recently discovered we have over 200 critical crawler issues on our site (mainly 4xx) We exported the CSV and it shows both a URL link and a referring URL. Both lead to a 'page not found' so I have two questions? What is the difference between a URL and a referring URL? What is the best practice/how do we fix this issue? Is it one for our web developer? Appreciate the help.
Moz Pro | | ayrutd1 -
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_generation1 -
How long do changes in title tags take to affect SEO?
This is kind of a loaded question. I'm completely new to SEO. I think my boss signed up for Moz Pro sometime in February and started adding data to our Ecommerce site to help with rankings. Sometime before this, I changed some of the title tags on the site (trying to help with organic search and CTR). I did not do a site wide change.... just changed maybe 10-20 (just a guess). I did it with keywords in mind but did not make note of when I did it. I didn't really know better at the time, and I did not have access to Google Analytics or Moz Pro. I was looking through the ranking data/graph for February and March. It won't let me look before February 29th (so that's why I think my boss started the Mos Pro subscription around at that time). On that day it said we ranked 12 keywords in the 1-3 spot, and then the following week (march 7) it went down to 6. I don't think or know if any major site changes were implemented, so I'm not sure why that happened and if it has anything to do with my title tag changes I did maybe a week or two before (again I am not sure when I did this unfortunately). Since then the keyword ranking numbers stayed about the same with organic traffic slowly going down (it could be because we are getting out of season for our industry though). The second week of March the site was upgraded and since then the menu has been completely changed around. Last week I did a site wide title tag change. So the minor changes I made in February are no longer in effect anyway. I added more keywords to Moz earlier this week and the number for 1-3 spot keywords went up from 6 to 20. It also says my ranking moved up 4 keywords and down 13 keywords. Anyway, I am wondering how seriously I should take these changes and if I'm damaging the site. I am new to Moz Pro also so all the data you can access is kind of confusing/overwhelming.
Moz Pro | | AliMac260 -
Youtube traffic page url referral
Hello, How can I see which videos from Youtube that has my domain inserted in their description url drive traffic to my domain? I can see in GA how many visitors are coming from Youtube to my domain, but I can't see what Youtube video pages has driven traffic. Any help?
Moz Pro | | xeonet320 -
What user agent is used by SEOMOZ crawler?
We have a pretty tight robots.txt file in place to only allow the major search engines. I do not want to block SEOMOZ.ORG from being able to crawl the site so I want to make sure the user agent is open.
Moz Pro | | eseider0 -
Use of the tilde in URLs
I just signed up for SEOMoz and sent my site through the first crawl. I use the tilde in my rewritten URLs. This threw my entire site into the Notice section 301 (permanent redirect) since each page redirects to the exact URL with the ~, not the %7e. I find conflicting information on the web - you can use the tilde in more recent coding guidelines where you couldn't in the old. It would be a huge thing to change every page in my site to use an underscore instead of a tilde int he URL. If Google is like SEOMoz and is 301 redirecting every page on the site, then I'll do it, but is it just an SEOMoz thing? I ran my site through Firebug and and all my pages show the 200 response header, not the 301 redirect. Thanks for any help you can provide.
Moz Pro | | fdb0 -
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 | | Greg800