Are the CSV downloads malformatted, when a comma appears in a URL?
-
Howdy folks, we've been a PRO member for about 24 hours now and I have to say we're loving it! One problem I am having with however is a CSV exported from our crawl diagnostics summary that I've downloaded.
The CSV contains all the data fine, however I am having problems with it when a URL contains a comma. I am making a little tool to work with the CSVs we download and I can't parse it properly because there sometimes URLs contain commas and aren't quoted the same as other fields, such as meta_description_tag, are.
Is there something simple I'm missing or is it something that can be fixed?
Looking forward to learn more about the various tools. Thanks for the help.
-
I won't be too hard on the programmers - I'm a programmer myself. Our small business has developers and designers doing the bulk of the SEO. I can see you've looked in to it as I have - there are many factors involved if I was to decide to "fix" this myself. To be honest, I don't fancy it - I'm hoping the better approach will come from the wonderful SEO Moz developers who might put in a fix. Hint hint.
-
The first rule in this business is "You can't trust programmers"
I should know, I am a programmer and I used to manage teams of them.
You can't trust them to write something perfect, because they will always make huge assumptions, based on what they know.
They should know that URLs can contain commas, and they should quote them.
If they didn't do that in the final field, it is a deficiency in the code and your stuff isn't going to workunless you fix it manually.
What you need to do to fix this is to add a quote after the 10th comma and also add one at the end of each line.
Unfortunately, even that is a problem.
The problem is there are other fields that may not be quoted, some of which can start with http://
There can also be line breaks in the title field, and possibly even in the link text field.
Quotes and other characters are escaped with double quotes.
Titles and link text can also contain commas, so it is very complex.
Some of the fields are a bigger mess because it depends on the link text, and if the link text contains an image, you'll have quotes and equals signs, commas and all kinds of stuff. You can also have upper ascii characters and multibyte characters.
They did actually quote the first URL, if it contains commas.
They really should have quoted every field
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
-
Links>TopPages: Mostly image URLs: Good for SEO? Redirect obsolete ones??
Looking at my "Links > Top Pages" report shows the top fifteen being image URLs (jpg files). Weird or normal? Clicking the "View Links" icon for a few of the image URL's shows that the best links in the list have DA in the 30's and 40's, and some PA in the 20's. But the linking sites have names that SOUND pretty crappy (from sites with names that sound weird or spammy) QUESTION 1: Do links to image URLs... A) help the overall SEO of the site's HTML pages, B) only help the specific page the image appears on, C) or are they of no value to the regular pages? QUESTION 2: What to do with the obsolete images? (images still hosted on our site, but do not appear on any pages) If I remove the images, the links will be lost. Which is good if the links are hurting us, but it would be bad for our SEO if the links are helping (unless we 301 the obsolete images to current ones) Thanks!
Moz Pro | | GregB1230 -
Recovering rankings after a botched url change
Hi there, I have for a long time had a bicycle maintenance website at madegood.org. Over the years the film branch of this business has taken off and moved in a slightly different direction, so I thought in March I decided to move madegood.org to madegoobikes.com, and create a new website for my film business at madegood.com. I thought I did a good job of telling google about my change of domain, but my rankings completely died, so about a month I moved madegoodbikes.com back to madegood.org. So far I haven't seen any sign of a recovery in my rankings, I'm getting almost no visits. I've check all my top pages on OSE and everything seems to be in place. https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/pages?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.madegood.org%2F&no_redirects=0&sort=page_authority&filter=all&page=1 Is it normal to wait over a month for my rankings to recover, or is there anything else I should be doing? Any tips/ideas/advice whatsoever will of huge help!
Moz Pro | | madegood0 -
Is www.domain.com/page the same url as www.domain.com/page/ for Google? (extra slash at end of url)
Dear all, in open site explorer there is a difference the url's 'www.domain.com/page' and 'www.domain.com/page/' (extra slash at end). There can be different values in pageauthority etc. in the open site explorer tool, but is this also the case for Google? Thanks for replying, Regards, Ben
Moz Pro | | HMK-NL0 -
The CSV export seems to have some linebreaks in it sometimes (e.g. in title column). That breaks excel import... any tips?
Example: http://www.unav.es/alumni/actividades/enlaces.html,"Alumni | Agrupaciones territoriales | Club de montaña Alumni | Universidad de Navarra.",Kompass,39,81,2,10356,Yes,No,External,http://www.kompass.de/http://wikipedia.msn.de/wiki/Kompass_Karten, MSN Wikipedia - Kompass Karten,www.kompass.at,26,78,1,15883,No,No,External,http://www.kompass.de/
Moz Pro | | mindshape0 -
What is the quickest way to get OSE data for many URLs all at once?
I have over 400 URLs in a spreadsheet and I would like to get Open Site Explorer data (domain/page authority/trust etc) for each URL. Would I use the Linkscape API to do this quickly (ie not manually entering every single site into OSE)? Or is there something in OSE or a tool I am overlooking? And whatever the best process is, can you give a brief overview? Thanks!! -Dan
Moz Pro | | evolvingSEO0 -
How do I get the Page Authority of individual URLs in my exported (CSV) crawl reports?
I need to prioritize fixes somehow. It seems the best way to do this would be to filter my exported crawl report by the Page Authority of each URL with an error/issue. However, Page Authority doesn't seem to be included in the crawl report's CSV file. Am I missing something?
Moz Pro | | Twilio0 -
I'm not getting the csv emailed in OSE? Anyone else?
The new version of the tool does not allow me to download the data via csv immediately. It says it will email in 5-10 minutes and never comes? Anyone else having this problem? Cheers
Moz Pro | | josey0 -
Rel Canonical issues for two urls sharing same IP address
Our client built a wordpress site on url A, then opted for a better url B. Rather than moving all the wordpress files/website over to the new url B, they just contacted GoDaddy, who hosted BOTH urls under the same IP address. When I do a term target on url B, I'm flagged for rel canonical use. I can only get a B grade for each keyword. (I've also tried using url A, but I get the same flag and B grade results). I'm not sure if this set-up will thwart our seo efforts for the site, because only the homepage comes up when you type in url B anyway. Every subsequent page displays the original url A. Somewhere, wordpress is also adding a rel canonical link on the homepage source to url A, too, which we can't seem to edit. So, question is: is it ok to leave this set up as is with both urls hosted on the same IP address, or should we move the whole site over to the desired url B? Thanks much!
Moz Pro | | GravitateOnline0