"New" issues not previously found being shown?
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I'm not sure what logic Moz is using for its reporting of Site Crawl issues, but it appears to be pretty flawed (unless I'm missing something, which is possible).
I've got a client site that has been in Moz for about 6 months now. Every time the crawler runs, the same number of pages are reported as having been crawled. However I'm consistently getting "New Issues" reported that should have been reported during previous crawls.
Example: A redirect chain was reported several month ago. The referring URL was the homepage of the website, and we tracked it down to an old link in the header. This was fixed, marked as resolved, and the issue was not shown on the next crawl. Several weeks later, the same issue was reported for a different page on the website - a page which has existed since 2014 and was already crawled many times. Again, we fixed. Fast-forward to the report that just ran on 12/1 and we have the same issue reported, for a different page, which has also existed for years and has been previously crawled.
It's very hard to explain to a client "this item you are seeing has been resolved", only to have it continually crop back up in future reports. Note this is not limited to redirect chains - that's just an example. I'm seeing this for other items such as missing canonicals, duplicate titles, etc.
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Well, you can't 100% rely on third-party tools anyways they might miss it sometimes especially Moz, they are still rookie in this. The other day, I got an email from Moz saying that we couldn't crawl one of your site "Warning" Red alert etc, Robots.txt isn't there. I doubled check it manually everything was smooth and then I made Moz re-crawl the site to check if everything is okay so yes it was.
Moz needs to work hard to improve their tool and it's function it doesn't give you the proff look and feel.
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So the community is aware, I wrote into Moz for clarification on this and the response was:
Unfortunately it would not be possible to retroactively investigate why we were not previously picking up on these issues as I can only see your site as it is now.
So....either Moz software has a bug, or is not actually crawling sites in their entirety as they say they are. It's one or the other...
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Thanks Meghan; I've sent an email in with 3 examples from 3 different campaigns.
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Hi there!
Thanks so much for the great question! We'd be more than happy to look into this for you. Can you send an email on over to help@moz.com with the Campaign you're working with and some specific examples of the new issues you're seeing? That way we can dig into this and see what's going on.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
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