Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Why Only Our Homepage Can Be Crawled Showing a Redirect Message as the Meta Title
-
Hello Everyone,
So recently when we checked our domain using a Moz Crawl Test and Screaming Frog only the homepage comes up and the meta title says “You are being redirected to…”. We have several pages that used to come up and when submitting them to GSC no issues come up. The robots.txt file looks fine as well.
We thought this might be ‘server’ related but it’s a little out of our field of expertise so we thought we would find out if anyone has any experience with this (ideas of reasons, how to check…etc.) or any potential suggestions.
Any extra insight would be really appreciated.
Please let us know if there is anything we could provide further details for that might.
Looking forward to hearing from all of you!
Thanks in advance.
Best,
-
Hello Kris,
Thank you very much for your help. We’ll contact the host to see if they could help. Is there any way to check if it’s the CMS and database structure or is that also something for the hosting company?
Also, we checked and there was an issue with the sitemap.xml. Could that have been a potential cause? - More just curious.
Please let us know if there are details we could provide that might help.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Thanks again.
Best,
-
1- This may be accredited to your CMS and the database structure it relies on to function.
2- Ask your website host for support regarding this issue. Some issues like this are server level and cannot be corrected at the client level.
3- I would look into webmaster tools to make sure the sitemap is submitted properly and redirects are at a minimum. Also, conduct a few fetch as googlebot tactics.
-
Hi Ben,
Would you mind sharing the URL for the site?
Thanks,
Sal
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
-
WEbsite cannot be crawled
I have received the following message from MOZ on a few of our websites now Our crawler was not able to access the robots.txt file on your site. This often occurs because of a server error from the robots.txt. Although this may have been caused by a temporary outage, we recommend making sure your robots.txt file is accessible and that your network and server are working correctly. Typically errors like this should be investigated and fixed by the site webmaster. I have spoken with our webmaster and they have advised the below: The Robots.txt file is definitely there on all pages and Google is able to crawl for these files. Moz however is having some difficulty with finding the files when there is a particular redirect in place. For example, the page currently redirects from threecounties.co.uk/ to https://www.threecounties.co.uk/ and when this happens, the Moz crawler cannot find the robots.txt on the first URL and this generates the reports you have been receiving. From what I understand, this is a flaw with the Moz software and not something that we could fix form our end. _Going forward, something we could do is remove these rewrite rules to www., but these are useful redirects and removing them would likely have SEO implications. _ Has anyone else had this issue and is there anything we can do to rectify, or should we leave as is?
Moz Pro | | threecounties0 -
Should I set blog category/tag pages as "noindex"? If so, how do I prevent "meta noindex" Moz crawl errors for those pages?
From what I can tell, SEO experts recommend setting blog category and tag pages (ie. "http://site.com/blog/tag/some-product") as "noindex, follow" in order to keep the page quality of indexable pages high. However, I just received a slew of critical crawl warnings from Moz for having these pages set to "noindex." Should the pages be indexed? If not, why am I receiving critical crawl warnings from Moz and how do I prevent this?
Moz Pro | | NichGunn0 -
301 or canonical for multiple homepage versions?
I used 301 redirects to point several versions of the homepage to www.site.com. i was just rereading moz's beginners guide to seo, and it uses that scenario as an example for rel canonical, not 301 redirects. Which is better? My understanding is that 301s remove all doubt of getting links to the wrong version and diluting link equity.
Moz Pro | | kimmiedawn0 -
404 even after Successful 301 Redirection
Hi, I've got quite few 404 error links on my site and I manually redirected all of them one by one with 301. They are redirecting successfully. But when I check my MOZ analysis, it still shows me as 404 error. I've done this about 4 days ago and MOZ crawled to my site couple times after that if it's not everyday. Do you know what the issue could be? And how can I fix it? PS: I've used Wordpress Redirection tool for it first and redirection did not work. Then I had to install the Simple 301 Redirects plugin to get it done.
Moz Pro | | nunobaronio0 -
Some questions on Canonical tag AND 301 redirect
Hi everyone, I'm new here - always loved SEOMoz and glad to be part of the Pro community now. I have 2 questions regarding the Canonical URL tag. Some background info: We used to run an OsCommerce store, and recently migrated to Magento. In doing so, we right away created 301 redirects of the old category pages (OsCommerce) to the new category pages (Magento) via the Magento admin. Example: www.example.com/old-widget-category.html
Moz Pro | | yacpro13
301 redicrected to
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html In Magento admin, we have enabled the Canonical tag for all product and category pages. Here's how Magento sets up the Canonical tag: The URL of interest which we want to rank is:
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html However Magento sets up the canonical tag on this page to point to:
www.example.com/old-widget-category.html When using the SEOMoz On Page Report Card, it pick this up as an error because the Canonical tag is pointing to a different URL. However, if we dig a little deeper, we see that the URL being pointed to
www.example.com/old-widget-category.html
has a 301 redirect to
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html
which is the URL we wan to rank. So because we set up a 301 redirect of the old-page to the new-page, on the new-page the canonical tag points to the old-page. Question 1)
What are you opinions on this? Do you think this method of setting up the Canonical tag is acceptable? Second question... We use pagination for category pages, so if we have 50 products in one category, we would have 5 pages of 10 products. The URL's would be: www.example.com/new-widget-category.html (which is the SAME as ?p=1)
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=1
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=2
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=3
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=4
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=5 Now ALL the URLs above have the canonical tag set as:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/new-widget-category" /> However, the content of each page (page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) is different because different products are displayed. So far most what I read regarding the Canonical tag is that it is used for pages that have the same content but different URLs. I would hope that Google would combine the content of all 5 pages and view the result as a single URL www.example.com/new-widget-category Question 2) Is using the canonical tag appropriate in the case described above? Thanks !0 -
How long does a crawl take?
A crawl of my site started on the 8th July & is still going on - is there something wrong???
Moz Pro | | Brian_Worger1 -
Missing Meta Description tags?
I just ran our first SEOMoz pro report and it's showing that every article page on our site is missing descriptions. However, it's visible on the source and Google seems to be picking them up.
Moz Pro | | notebooks
Can you please tell me why SEOMoz is makring them as missing? Are we doing something wrong here? http://notebooks.com0 -
Title tag on sitemap.xml
The SEO moz is showing an error on one of the sites within my SE Moz account campaign under Crawl Diagnostics: Title tag missing or empty. No problem here but the file associated with this issue is sitemap.xml and that just dose't look right as as far as I know xml files are title tag free. I've searched around and i've been able only to confirm my initial thought that sitemap.xml dose't use a title tag .. like any other xml. is this an issue ? (the error that is) or i should let it slide. can it be fixed ? if yes, how ? Thanks !
Moz Pro | | eyepaq1