Why can no tool crawl this site?
-
I am trying to perform a crawl analysis on a client's website at https://www.bravosolution.com
I have tried to crawl it with IIS for SEO, Sreaming Frog and Xenu and not one of them makes it further than the home page of the site. There is nothing I can see in the robots.txt that is blocking these agents.
As far as I can see, Google is able to crawl the site although they have noticed a significant drop in organic traffic.
Any advise would be very welcome
Regards
Danny
-
I would look into finding a method to redirect via your server rather than with javascript. This will ensure that bots can properly crawl your site.
I would also add hreflang tags which should help Google with the multiple language versions of the site.
Also in the short term you may want to do something like add a link or a delayed meta refresh just in case someone either has javascript disabled or is using script blocking extensions. This will make sure they at least see something instead of a blank page.
-
Really helpful and much appreciated - many thanks!
Danny
-
Yes that's what I said CleverPhD, I just couldn't type that fast today.
Only joking Thanks for expanding on the subject.
-
To expand on Dean's point.
If you look at the source code on https://www.bravosolution.com/ you get a bunch of JavaScript (shown below). It is basically looking at the users location and the sending them to the appropriate version of your website based on country. This is why here in the US we are sent to https://www.bravosolution.com/cms/us
Many spiders/tools (and Googlebot was not really good at this until recently) are not good at (or do not do any) crawling and executing on JavaScript so they get stuck when they hit your home page.
If you want to evaluate any of your localized sites, just run those URLs through various tools like screaming frog etc. You would then ask, "Well, how do I know that my main https://www.bravosolution.com is working properly for SEO?". I don't have as much background in how to optimize for international SEO, but you can do a several things to start with.
-
Google anything having to do with Aleyda Solis and International SEO. She posts a lot of stuff here at Moz and is pretty sharp on this stuff. There may be a more appropriate way to redirect international clients from your main page that how you are executing.
-
Run your home page through Google Webmaster Tools under Crawl > Fetch as Google. See what the page looks like
-
Double check your robots.txt to make sure you are not blocking any folders that would contain a JavaScript library. Based on the code below, I do not see you referencing any external libraries, but if you are dependent on JS to send Google, it would be worth having your developer check things
-
As with everything on what to do, it all depends. If all of your local country sites are independently ranked and successful, this main website may nor may not be doing you any favors currently if it is just a pass through with no domain authority to start with. Spend time on step #1 to see if there is anything else worth doing.
Cheers!
name="description" />
-
-
Yes, it should redirect you to the correct country version based on your IP. But I still can't crawl the site from the home page
-
Cheers Bryan - much appreciated. It's driving me crazy!
-
Hi Danny,
Have you looked at the site via http://web-sniffer.net/
It would appear that the home page is just a JavaScript redirect.
I was redirected to https://www.bravosolution.com/cms/us which then could seen via Sreaming Frog.
The reason for my (default) redirect is given by web-sniffer as:
DEFAULT CORPORATE if ( path == '' ) { path = '/cms/us
-
Interesting. I verified the robots file and tried running through screaming frog... nothing. I' will dig into this with my dev team to try and get you an answer asap.
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
-
Our clients Magento 2 site has lots of obsolete categories. Advice on SEO best practice for setting server level redirects so I can delete them?
Our client's Magento website has been running for at least a decade, so has a lot of old legacy categories for Brands they no longer carry. We're looking to trim down the amount of unnecessary URL Redirects in Magento, so my question is: Is there a way that is SEO efficient to setup permanent redirects at a server level (nginx) that Google will crawl to allow us at some point to delete the categories and Magento URL Redirects? If this is a good practice can you at some point then delete the server redirects as google has marked them as permanent?
Technical SEO | | Breemcc0 -
Bing is not Indexing my site.
Hi, My website is four months old and has more than 8000 pages. Bing has indexed only 8 pages till date and Google also keeps playing hide and seek with it. There was a time when google indexed almost all the pages of my site but now there are only 5000 pages indexed. Moreover when I check my site on google (by typing site:socktail.com), it shows only 26 pages. Please let me know what should I do. If somebody wants to take a look, my website is http://socktail.com Thanks
Technical SEO | | saurabh19050 -
Can the Hosting location of image files have a negative effect if on the developers own media server rather than on client site server ?
Hi Can the Hosting location of image files have a negative effect if on the developers own media server as opposed to on the actual websites server ? In the case i'm looking at the image files are hosted on a totally separate server (a media subdomain of the developers site server) from the subject sites dedicated server. Will engines still attribute the properties of files hosted in this manner to the main website (such as file name or should they really be on the subject sites server own media folder ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Crawl rate
Hello, In google WMT my site has the following message. <form class="form" action="/webmasters/tools/settings-ac?hl=en&siteUrl=http://www.prom-hairstyles.org/&siteUrl=http://www.prom-hairstyles.org/&hl=en" method="POST">Your site has been assigned special crawl rate settings. You will not be able to change the crawl rate.Why would this be?A bit of backgound - this site was hammered by Penguin or maybe panda but seems to be dragging itself back up (maybe) but has dropped from several thousand visitors/day to 100 or so.Cheers,Ian</form>
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Does Google pass link juice a page receives if the URL parameter specifies content and has the Crawl setting in Webmaster Tools set to NO?
The page in question receives a lot of quality traffic but is only relevant to a small percent of my users. I want to keep the link juice received from this page but I do not want it to appear in the SERPs.
Technical SEO | | surveygizmo0 -
Optimize flash site
Hello, How can we optimize a site like this - http://www.ziba.com.au/ . The whole site is in flash. What are the alternatives ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Whats the best tools for site architecture
Look for tools that can visualise a sites architecture (idealy automated). Also looking for tools that can visualise internal linking sturures
Technical SEO | | Motionlab0