Abnormal crawl issues appearing in my Moz results
-
I have been asked to look at a site for a friend and was more than surprised to see 16,9k crawl issues appear in the dashboard... of this 6,238 are duplicate page content and 5878 are duplicated page titles.
What on earth is going on? I have spoken to the web developer as it appears there is a dev site somewhere and this is his response
[Can I stress that Google determines which site was in the index first and then removes other sites it sees as having duplicate content. Our dev sites appearing in the search index would not affect your ranking due to duplicate content as Google would see your site as the first site with the content]
As I cannot make contact with him, I am scratching my head, surely a dev site should be no-indexed, it sounds as though he is saying that its ok because Google will take the main site as the first site with the content...
Very confused! Help need MOZ community.
Manythanks,
Sarah
-
Thanks again Dirk. I like your direct and knowledgeable responses. I have sent a Linkedin connection!!
Many thanks,
Sarah
-
Hi Sarah,
Googlebot will follow these links as well and discover these "useless" pages (the are off course not useless from human perspective but they don't add value for bots - and they will be considered as duplicates). Duplicates are no reason for "punishment" - so you could just let them be. Personally I would put a nofollow on these links or add a "noindex" tag to the login page. Normally you shouldn't use nofollow on internal links - but login pages are an exemption on this (check also https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2298312/matt-cutts-you-dont-have-to-nofollow-internal-links : "Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule, and things like login pages can be the exception. He said it doesn’t hurt to put the nofollow link for a link pointing to a login page, or things like terms and conditions or other “useless” pages. However, it doesn’t hurt at all for those pages to be crawled by Google."
For the practical part - if you add an additional question to a question which has been marked as answered - only the ones who have already answered will see the additional question. To be on the safe side - it's better open a new question if you want other people to have a look at it.
Hope this helps,
Dirk
-
hello Dirk, thank you for that great answer, we have since been doing a bit more digging of our own and before we go back to the web developer we want to check what should be happening with the links the we are finding duplicated as we are seeing that the issues relating to Duplicate Pages are coming from links from the login page which shows information about where the user was redirected from.
For example, if the visitor is not logged on and wishes to wish-list an item, they will be redirected to the login page, with the item code and intended action in the url; which can then continue on to the desired page once logged on.
The MOZ crawler is seeing these pages as having Duplicated Content whilst they are all the same apart from a piece of information in the URL. Should we be blocking these duplications? Are they a risk to us? What should we be doing?
I have also added this as a new question - I am quite new to this community thing so wasn't sure which was the best way to ask the question.
Many thanks again,
Sarah
-
Moz is only indexing pages it's crawler is able to find. This implies that on your production site you have links to your development site.
Don't really agree with what your dev is saying - he should correct these links first; put a noindex on these pages. Alternative - put a password on the dev site so it's only accessible with a password. If a lot of users are putting links to your dev site it could become more important than your main site. Google will try to choose the most appropriate site - but you have no guarantee that it will choose the right version. In any case - that's not the type of risk you should be willing to take.
Once this is done - you can request a removal of these pages via the search console.
If all pages are removed from the index you can adapt the robots.txt to prevent access to the Google & other bots. Do this only after all pages are removed - if not Google will never find the noindex directive.
Dirk
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 MOZ and Google search Volume so different?
A search term in MOZ shows the monthly search volume to be 49K. In Google, the same term shows the search volume at only 1300 monthly searches. Which do I trust? Thanks, Don
Moz Pro | | rcman0 -
Moz Crawl Test: WordPress sites with and without /feed and /trackback entires?
I have multiple WP websites and on some of the websites, on my Moz Crawl test, I see an entry for every blog post but also entries for /feed and /trackback for that single blog post. For example, www...com/someArticle www....com/someArticle/feed www...com/someArticle/trackback 1. Can anyone explain why the Crawl test is picking up the /feed and /trackback items? Is it simply because they are 301 redirects to the original post (www...com/someArticle)? 2. What setting(s) in WordPress are making this information appear? Or is it just that the site(s) that have the /feed and /trackback are displaying "normal" behavior for a WP site with a lot of trackbacks and feed entires? 3. Should /fee and /trackback, as well as /author be blocked in robots.txt? Thanks in advance for your advice and input!
Moz Pro | | Titan5520 -
Crawl Diagnostics - Historical Summary
As we've been fixing errors on our website, the crawl diagnostic graphs have been showing great results (top left to bottom right for errors). The problem is the graphs themselves aren't very pretty. I can't use them in my internal reports (all internal reports are standardised colours/formats). Is there anyway of exporting the top level summary with historic data so the graphs can be recreated in company colours? I don't want the detailed CSV breakdown of what errors occurred, but rather than on X date there were Y errors, the next month Z errors and so forth. The data must already be in the SEOMoz system in order to create the graphs themselves - I was hoping this can be made available to us if it isn't already? Does anyone know if there is already a way of doing this? I've tried to 'inspect element' and find the underlying data in the source code but to no avail, and can't see any exports that would do this. Thanks in advance Dean
Moz Pro | | FashionLux0 -
My Campaign only crawled 3 pages on my site
On my first crawl of a new campaign, the software only crawled 3 pages. XXXaceXXXscholarships.org any ideas?
Moz Pro | | Santaur0 -
Unable to crawl pages
Hi, I am trying to set up a campaign for our website - www.salvationarmy.org.au however, I can't seem to get a scan of more than three pages. I have tried the following: www.salvationarmy.org.au (only 2 pages) www.salvationarmy.org.au/home (only 1 page) salvationarmy.org.au (only 3 pages) There is a geo IP redirect on www.salvationarmy.org.au but the second domain listed above should resolve the full site. I'm a newbie to SEOmoz so any help would be appreciated! Thanks, Mel
Moz Pro | | KingPings0 -
Crawl Diagnostics : Problem of display in Excell.
Hi Mozers, I've just finished watching the Crawl Diagnostics Webinar and when I try to export one of my campaign into the CSV format, I've a display problem into Microsoft Excell. Every headtitles are into the "A" column so, I can't do anything with that : I can't organize the data,... It's totally unreadable. What can I do? Thank you for yours answers. Jonathan
Moz Pro | | JonathanLeplang0 -
Changing the Timeframe of Historical Crawl Data
Hello, Just read a great post about the implications of duplicate content for sites after the most recent Panda update: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+seomoz+(SEOmoz+Daily+Blog) In the post is an image or crawl data history that shows months, not days or weeks, worth of trending data as it relates to duplicate content. So my question is this: How do I change my view/date range on my own campaigns so that I can view the trailing months of data rather than only what seems to be the past 4 weeks or so? This would really help me identify the impact of some on page changes we've recently made for a client. Many Thanks, Jared
Moz Pro | | surjm0