Perplexed - Errors increasing, moz rank dropping, conflicting data from other sources. Please Help.

[KJDMedia]

Hi there,

I'm in a bit of a bind and could seriously do with some help. For the past month I've been working with a client to resolve errors onsite.

In that period my moz rank has plummeted and my errors (dupe title & content) have increased dramatically. The correlation makes sense, the increase - not so much.

Here's why, screaming frog is reporting that the majority of duplicate titles have been removed or dealt with. I've also got the assurance of the developer that the suggested changes are being implemented.

Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the CMS - umbraco - and this is the first time I'm working with this particular developer, so I'm not sure how to gauge progress without using moz tools.

So, here are my immediate questions:

1.   Why would I get different results from Screaming Frog and Rogerbot?

2.   Has anyone here been in a similar situation and could they recommend areas to watch for errors         creeping in?

3.   Is there a way of identifying which errors have occurred when? Narrowing it down to the week each error occurred would be good enough.

4. Is anybody aware of any inherent SEO flaws in umbraco or common SEO mistakes made using the CMS?

5.   is there anything I could provide you with to help you help me?

6. Do you have a suggestion? I'm pretty stuck.

Thanks in advance.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Matthew,

Without getting into the specifics of your site, it would seem the first step would be to identify the duplication errors Moz reports to see if they are actually valid, and then determine what is causing them and takes steps to address them.

Within the duplicate content reports, there should be a number listed next to each URL showing the number of other pages with duplicate content. If you click on this number, you'll get a list of URLs.

By comparing these URLs against each other, you can start to identify the problem. Does that make sense? Perhaps you've already taken this step, but it's hard to tell from the question.

If you find that the URLs are fishy, and you suspect a problem with your CMS, it's often helpful to determine where the Moz crawlers discovered the links to these URLs. You can do this by downloading the entire CSV report. In the last column is a URL showing where the link was discovered. Knowing this is often helpful in rooting out problems.

Hope this helps! Best of luck.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Matt,

Well I quickly ran it through Xenu (don't have the paid version of screaming frog) and one thing that sticks out immediately is your training registration pages like http://www.cbmtraining.co.za/register.aspx?c_id=1269 and http://www.cbmtraining.co.za/register.aspx?d_id=2249 for example.

There are quite a few of these pages and they all have the same title. You could put the actual name of the specific event in the title tag and that will help. It would also be good to put a bigger description of some sort in the page for each event, otherwise the registration form data looks pretty much like duplicate content even if you have a couple of lines unique for each event on each page now. You have a couple of other duplicate page titles floating around, but sorting out that issue with the registration pages will cut down the numbers a lot and let you focus more clearly on the others.

[PaddyDisplays]

I'm not sure but  I think the Moz bot will report dup error even if the page is canonised. If they are canonised then they are fine (and screaming frog is not reporting them).  Best thing is to randomly pick some example links its reporting as dups and check them out manually see if they are correct

[KJDMedia]

Hi Lynn,

Thank you very much for your assistance. The URL for the site is www.cbmtraining.co.za. If you could give me any pointers I'd appreciate it.

1. I'm using the paid version of SF so I don't think I'm getting varying results because of the number of pages I'm crawling. Could it be something in the settings of SF?

2. Thanks for this tip. That's really handy to know.

3. My gut feel is that something fishy is happening from the Dev's side. None of my other projects are experiencing similar problems and moz are showing an increase in errors, not the decrease I was expecting.

All the best,

Matt

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Matthew,

It would help to have a url to look at but I can suggest a couple of things to consider:

1. If you are using the screaming frog free version it limits you to 500 pages, the moz scan will go up to 10,000 so that might account for the mismatch in numbers.

2. The moz results will be valid results for the latest scan, so if you are seeing errors in the moz reports they are current errors.
If you download the error report in csv, then select all your data and do the ctrl-windows-L command it will convert your data to filterable tables. You can then filter by dup title/dup content and the far left column will be the duped pages and the far right column where each page is linked from.

3. I dont know anything about the specific CMS but all cms usually have the ability to spawn out duplicate links through various automatic mechanisms like links to print versions of pages and things like that. If this accounts for a chunk of your dup content then it should be a pretty easy dev fix to get rid of these systematic type errors in one go which should reduce the number of duplicate issues and let you focus more clearly on 'real' duplicate content issues.

Hope that helps!