Initial Crawl Questions
-
Hello.
I just joined and used the Crawl tool. I have many questions and hoping the community can offer some guidance.
1. I received an Excel file with 3k+ records. Is there a friendly online viewer for the Crawl report? Or is the Excel file the only output?
2. Assuming the Excel file is the only output, the Time Crawled is a number (i.e. 1305798581). I have tried changing the field to a date/time format but that did not work. How can I view the field as a normal date/time such as May 15, 2011 14:02?
3. I use the symbol in my Title. This symbol appears in the output as a few ascii characters. Is that a concern? Should I remove the trademark symbol from my Title?
4. I am using XenForo forum software. All forum threads automatically receive a Title Tag and Meta Description as part of a template. The Crawl Test report shows my Title Tag and Meta Description as blank for many threads. I have looked at the source code of several pages and they all have clean Title tags and I don't understand why the Crawl Report doesn't show them. Any ideas?
5. In some cases the HTTP Status Code field shows a result of "3". Why does that mean?
6. For every URL in the Crawl Report there is an entry in the Referrer field. What exactly is the relationship between these fields? I thought the Crawl Tool would inspect every page on the site. If a page doesn't have a referring page is it missed? What if a page has multiple referring pages? How is that information displayed?
7. Under Google Webmaster Tools > Site Configurations > Settings > Parameter Handling I have the options set as either "Ignore" or "Let Google Decide" for various URL parameters. These are "pages" of my site which should mostly be ignored. For example a forum may have 7 headers, each on of which can be sorted in ascending or descending order. The only page that matters is the initial page. All the rest should be ignored by Google and the Crawl.
Presently there are 11 records for many pages which really should only have one record due to these various sort parameters. Can I configure the crawl so it ignores parameter pages?
I am anxious to get started on my site. I dove into the crawl results and it's just too messy in it's present state for me to pull out any actionable data. Any guidance would be appreciated.
-
Good question. There are a few ways of doing it but I'd advise using a canonical URL on each page to tell the search engines where the content stems from. I had a quick look at XenoForo and this looks relatively simple to do... although make sure you test things thoroughly just in case
-
Thank you very much for the detailed reply.
For #1, I did start my campaign and I will follow up.
2. That worked perfect!
3. Thank you for the information.
4. I realize the problem. It appears the crawler differentiates on the slightest difference in a URL. There are many pages which it shows ending with a slash "/" but those pages are often linked to without an ending slash. The latter pages do not show their Titles nor Meta tags in the crawler report. I presume this is just a crawler issue and would not affect SEO performance.
5. I checked the cell formatting and it is "General" which should be fine. All of the rest of the HTTP Status codes appear normally. What I did notice is that all of the "3" codes refer to attachments. Most attachments show a "3" code, but a few show as 301s.
6. Good to know, thanks for sharing.
7. My main follow up question would be, is there any harm to setting up in robots.txt to disregard all parameter URLs? Basically I want to clean things up, and all of those URLs which are style or sorting variations aren't helpful to any crawler, and those pages shouldn't be indexed.
-
I can help with a few of those:
1. Looks like you're using the crawl tool. If this is for an on-going project, go to http://www.seomoz.org/campaigns and set one up. That way you get a sexy GUI (if you like robots that is) and weekly crawls / rank tracking.
2. That number is almost certainly a UNIX timestamp. To convert it inside excel use the formula below (don't forget to format the cell as a date, otherwise you just see a random number!):
=(A1/86400)+25569+(-5/24)
3. I wouldn't worry about that at all - the crawler converts any non-standard characters to ASCII but, as far as I know, it won't affect your SERP performance.
4. Could you give a few examples of the pages that are affected so I can take a look?
5. That's either a bug or (not too likely but worth checking) an issue with how the numbers are formatted in your spreadsheet. I'd advise opening the file using a text editor to check that the numbers that excel shows match up with the raw format and, if they do, submitting a bug report to the SEOMoz team.
6. The referrer cell tells you how the crawler got to that page. If you don't have any internal links to a page on your site then, chances are, the crawler won't find it. The only caveat to that (and I'm not 100% sure so would need confirmation) is that if the crawl tool uses external linking data. I'd always assumed it didn't but SEOMoz will know where some of your pages are even if you don't link to them internally as external sites will point to them. If that's the case it could be the reason that the referrer cell is blank.
7. Remember that this is SEOMoz crawling your site, not Google. Anything you set in Webmaster tools isn't visible by other search engine spiders such as those used by Bing, Yahoo!, SEOMoz, Majestic, etc. Because of that they won't know how to handle your URL parameters. You're best setting this through either a meta robots tag, robots.txt, or .htaccess (depending on what you're trying to do). Be careful though - if you mess it up there's a strong possibility that you'll end up blocking pages that you want the search engines to be able to access!
Hope that's all helpful... give me a shout if there's anything else.
- Matt
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
-
Unable to view crawl test
After doing a crawl test i get a download report. It then downloads in csv form and when I go to view it there is a curruption error or just a load of gibberish signs Can I not see the report onsite?
Moz Pro | | hantaah0 -
On-page grader question
Hi there, Getting to know the Pro tools and can't find an answer to this. Can someone explain for me please? Using on page grader, I found a couple pages with an F. I scrolled downWTO where it shows the keyword phrases and under each, the URL. Clicking on the first keyword "Building site alarms"it tells me off essentially for not optimising the page for that term. The URL is "construction site security systems" which are different to building site alarms which also have their own page. I don't understand why is Moz associating this keyword with this page? I certainly haven't told it to. Please he
Moz Pro | | DaddySmurf0 -
Crawl Diagnostics: Next crawl date is in the past
Hi - I have quite a few crawl diagnostic errors and warnings. I have attempted to fix many of them but noticed this note at the bottom of the crawl diagnostics chart: "Last Crawl Completed: Mar. 22nd, 2013 Next Crawl Starts: Mar. 29th, 2013" It looks like SEOMoz thinks the next crawl date is Mar 29th, 2013, which is two weeks ago. Is there any way to "force" the crawl and get it back on regular schedule? This may have happened when my account was disabled because my credit card expired...Thoughts?
Moz Pro | | 6thirty0 -
Only One page crawled..Need help
I have run a website in Seomoz which have many URLs with it. But when I saw the seomoz report that showing Pages Crawled: 1. Why this is happen my campaign limit is OK Tell me what to do for all page crawling in seomoz report. wV6fMWx
Moz Pro | | lucidsoftech0 -
Does Open Site Explorer purposefully not crawl some sites?
I use both SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer and Web Master Tools to find backlinks when conducting link audits. WMT always finds more links than OSE; I understand Google's database is bigger. But what is interesting to me is that it seems that a large percentage of the links WMT finds that OSE does not are real crappy links that I don't want. That makes me wonder if SEOmoz decides not to crawl certain, low quality, sites? Just curious.
Moz Pro | | ILM_Marketing0 -
Who wants to help go over my crawl diagnostics via skype?
I have run a crawl diagnostic on my site and have 194 errors and most of them are 404 errors in wordpress. Not sure why, but many of my pages had name changes (possibly a permalinks issue) but I have no idea how to fix it. I had 5 duplicate page titles, and 1 tile missing or empty. 72 crawl notices found (2 permanent redirect, 17 blocked by robots, 53 rel canonical) 19 Crawl warnings were found Who wants to have some fun?
Moz Pro | | starkSEO0 -
How come I cannot ask one question a month to the pro's ?
I just got a major increase of errors on my website on the last crawl. I haven't touched my web site ( other than adding content ) for the past 3 months. It's like more than 500 errors I got on the last crawl, How can I call SeoMoz tech support ? I cannot use my 'One question a month to the pro's a option', cannot select the option pretending I have used my question this month where it is not true. Need help. Thanks
Moz Pro | | processia0 -
Crawl Diagnostics Summary
Sorry if I am not asking in the right place. On Crawl Diagnostics Summary it says this right..?? : "To get you started quickly Roger is crawling up to 250 pages on your site. You should see these results within two hours. The full crawl will complete within 7 days.". so it's passed a day and it still doesn't show nothing. It says "Processing Crawl Data for 358 pages" How much should i wait??
Moz Pro | | Dussk0