Has any on else experienced a spike in crawl errors?

[BallyhooLtd]

Hi,

Since the last time our sites were crawled in SEOmoz they are all showing a spike in Errors. (Mainly duplicate page titles and duplicate content).

We haven't changed anything to the structure of the sites but they are all using the same content management system.

The image is an example of what we are witnessing for all our sites based on the same system.

Is anyone else experiencing anything similar? or does anyone know of any changes that SEOmoz has implemented which may be affecting this?

Thanks in advance,

Anthony.

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[BallyhooLtd]

Thanks for all your replies.

We haven't changed anything on any of the sites. We use our own CMS which has not changed either.

Webmaster tools doesn't show the same errors as SEOMoz.

We appear to be in the same situation as Mike. We know that we have duplicate titles and content but we have taken care of our duplicate issues using canonical and no index tags, which drastically reduced our errors. For some reason SEOmoz doesn't seem to have paid heed to them on it's latest crawl.

Thanks Mike. At least we are not on our own.

Maybe I should see if this is rectified after the next SEOMoz crawl before I pursue this any further?

[MikeRoberts]

This leads me to a problem then. As per Dave (the author of the article), "using canonical tags will result in duplicate errors being suppressed. If one page refers to another as a duplicate, than that pair will not be reported as duplicates. Also, if two pages both refer to the same third page as their canonical, then they will not be reported as duplicates of each other, either."

But now that this change has gone into effect I have 2000+ more duplicate content errors appearing and they are all pages with rel="canonical" pointing to the original page. So, as he stated earlier in the post this has caused "the most negative customer experience we anticipate: having a behind-the-scenes change of our duplicate detection heuristic causing a sudden rash of incorrect "duplicate page" errors to appear for no apparent good reason."

Is this something that will eventually correct itself or is this something that will need tweaking of the new detection method?

[KeriMorgret]

We did change the way we detected duplicate content earlier this month. Here's a blog post about it at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/visualizing-duplicate-web-pages.

Hope this helps explain things for you! Let me know if you have any more questions.

[MikeRoberts]

I saw a huge spike after the last crawl. In my case, the canonicals we set on our site months ago to handle some duplicate content issues appear not to be seen by Seomoz's crawl. Though when I check for duplicate title & meta issues in Webmaster Tools I don't see the offending pages that SEOMoz is showing me. That leads me to believe something is happening with either how the SEOMoz system is reporting or how their bot is crawling.

[DarinPirkey]

What CMS are you using?

Did you add any menus to your home or sub-pages (ie footer menus or anything like that?)

Have you gone into the Errors and see what pages are being duplicated?

Have you implemented rel=canonical on the pages?

Is your CMS creating Titles for you or are they manually created?

Have you checked WMT to see if the duplicate issue is there too?  (under html improvements)

[donford]

No spikes in either of our campaigns.

You said that yours were related to duplicate page titles / content which likely means your CMS is generating duplicate pages. Could be related to reviews, sorting, comments etc..

Have had a chance to research the errors and see if those pages actually exist? We had an issue with Oscommerce and page sorting causing this same problem, we fixed it by implementing rel canonical tags.

Hope that helps