Site less than 20 pages shows 1,400+ pages when crawled
-
Hello! I’m new to SEO, and have been soaking up as much as I can. I really love it, and feel like it could be a great fit for me – I love the challenge of figuring out the SEO puzzle, plus I have a copywriting/PR background, so I feel like that would be perfect for helping businesses get a great jump on their online competition.
In fact, I was so excited about my newfound love of SEO that I offered to help a friend who owns a small business on his site. Once I started, though, I found myself hopelessly confused.
The problem comes when I crawl the site. It was designed in Wordpress, and is really not very big (part of my goal in working with him was to help him get some great content added!)
Even though there are only 11 pages – and 6 posts – for the entire site, when I use Screaming Frog to crawl it, it sees HUNDREDS of pages. It stops at 500, because that is the limit for their free version. In the campaign I started here at SEOmoz, and it says over 1,400 pages have been crawled…with something like 900 errors.
Not good, right?
So I've been trying to figure out the problem...when I look closer in Screaming Frog, I can see that some things are being repeated over and over. If I sort by the Title, the URLs look like they’re stuck in a loop somehow - one line will have /blog/category/postname…the next line will have /blog/category/category/postname…and the next line will have /blog/category/category/category/postname…and so on, with another /category/ added each time.
So, with that, I have two questions
- Does anyone know what the problem is, and how to fix it?
- Do professional SEO people troubleshoot this kind of stuff all of the time? Is this the best place to get answers to questions like that? And if not, where is?
Thanks so much in advance for your help! I’ve enjoyed reading all of the posts that are available here so far, it seems like a really excellent and helpful community...I'm looking forward to the day when I can actually answer the questions!!
-
Thanks, Irving! I am trying turning on/off the plugins - the person who designed the site used a WP Boxer plugin and Multiple Content Blocks plugin, and that is how the homepage is designed (feeding info from pages/posts) so I was wondering if that could be part of it...but when I turn them off/on that doesn't seem to help. So I'm trying the other plugins too (there are just a couple), and if that doesn't work, I'll try a fresh install!
I also tried changing the permalink structure to just /sample-post/ and that didn't seem to work either...but I'm going to keep working on it!
I haven't tried the Twitter approach yet - because I don't actually have a Twitter account (I'm trying to keep social media from taking over my life) - but if that's where the answers are, I guess I need to get on there!
-
Did you install plugins that might have caused the issue? I would deactivate all plugins and see if it has an effect then turn them on one at a time to see if you can isolate the issue.
If the plugins are not the issue, it might make sense to backup the DB and do a fresh install of WP which isn't hard.
-
I don't think the site moved hosts - I'm not the person who created it, but his business is relatively new, so if there was a change it would have been done with very little content on the site.
The permalink structure is custom and looks like this: /blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
Would something else be better? Let me know! Thanks!!
-
Hey K,
If you could post a screen shot of the Settings>Permalink structure screen in the Wordpress Dashboard, or just copy and paste whatever is written in there in a reply, that might help diagnose the issue. Also, do you know if the site has moved hosts recently and was re-installed using the Wordpress export & import feature?
-
Thanks, Alan! I'll try contacting those guys!
-
This is most likely a job for a WordPress programmer because it sounds like there's a major flaw in the site architecture. Andrew Norcross @Norcross on Twitter, and Joe Hall @JoeHall would be the two people I'd reach out to for guidance if it were me.
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
-
Why is my landing page title tag being applied to the entire site?
I have a unique title tag for every page on my site but depending on what page a user lands on, that title becomes the title tag for the entire site. For example, if you come in from SERPs via the "Zach King: My Magical Life" page, the title "Zach King: My Magical Life" title will be applied to every page on the site even though they have unique title tags. This is the site: https://www.shelfstuff.com/book-shelf. Any ideas on how to fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | craigkleila470 -
How to rank a page on established site quickly
Hi, I'm looking for information about how I can rank an e-commerce category page quickly from a link building perspective. It usually takes me 6-12 months to rank these pages within the top 3 spots with link building, but I would like to get results faster. My site is established for more than 10 years and performs well in Google organic search. Here is what usually works over a 6-12 month time span: 15-40 links within articles on DA 15-60 sites, built within 6-12 months More than 75% of the links are from blogs Variety of anchor text Combination of follow/nofollow Deep links to product pages within the category we're trying to rank Might be important to note that it was easy for us to get category pages listed in DMOZ categories, when it was still around but it didn't seem to play any role in getting ranked faster. Note: We only build links on real sites with real traffic and decent performance metrics. No PBNs or other crap sites. I'd sincerely appreciate it if anyone can make any suggestions or point me towards helpful info. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice0 -
How I can improve my website On page and Off page
My Website is guitarcontrol.com, I have very strong competition in market. Please advice me the list of improvements on my websites. In regarding ON page, Linkbuiding and Social media. What I can do to improve my website ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zoe.wilson170 -
B2B site targeting 20,000 companies with 20,000 dedicated "target company pages" on own website.
An energy company I'm working with has decided to target 20,000 odd companies on their own b2b website, by producing a new dedicated page per target company on their website - each page including unique copy and a sales proposition (20,000 odd new pages to optimize! Yikes!). I've never come across such an approach before... what might be the SEO pitfalls (other than that's a helluva number of pages to optimize!). Any thoughts would be very welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
SERPS showing wrong page
I have optimised a homepage for two keywords. I optimised this a few weeks ago and the page has been crawled by Google, also before this it was already reasonably well optimised for these terms. However, the homepage is not appearing in Google for these terms. Instead two other random pages on the site are appearing for these terms that have not been optimised for these keywords and have few mentions of the keywords on the pages!?? These pages have a lower DA and lower inbound links than the homepage. The homepage is showing for other lower competition keywords. Could anyone offer me some insight into this? The homepage content has been posted on other websites by a former SEO consultant - to a business directory for one? Could duplicate content be causing this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | absolutely170 -
More Indexed Pages than URLs on site.
According to webmaster tools, the number of pages indexed by Google on my site doubled yesterday (gone from 150K to 450K). Usually I would be jumping for joy but now I have more indexed pages than actual pages on my site. I have checked for duplicate URLs pointing to the same product page but can't see any, pagination in category pages doesn't seem to be indexed nor does parameterisation in URLs from advanced filtration. Using the site: operator we get a different result on google.com (450K) to google.co.uk (150K). Anyone got any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidLenehan0 -
"site" operator and pages
Hi folks, We are having trouble in indexing, We have certain pages which are not coming in results when I am using the site operator in Google. for e.g. : sitename.com/widgets/red They are not showing any link results in Google webmaster tools too. But the pages which only linked through them are displaying in results when I am using site operator. for e.g: sitename.com/widgets/red/large We are redirecting some of the search which are close or exact match to the respective pages for e.g: sitename.com/search/red --> sitename.com/widgets/red We are fluctuating on rankings too in google serps form top ppositions to no where, for sitename.com/widgets/red and most of the times when google shows sitename.com/search/red instead of itename.com/widgets/red. Can you please put a light on this issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | semshah1430 -
1 of the sites i work on keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page
1 of the sites i work on (www.eva-alexander.com) keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page I have no idea why and have never experienced this before
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GMD10