Why did Moz crawl our development site?
-
In our Moz Pro account we have one campaign set up to track our main domain. This week Moz threw up around 400 new crawl errors, 99% of which were meta noindex issues.
What happened was that somehow Moz found the development/staging site and decided to crawl that. I have no idea how it was able to do this - the robots.txt is set to disallow all and there is password protection on the site. It looks like Moz ignored the robots.txt, but I still don't have any idea how it was able to do a crawl - it should have received a 401 Forbidden and not gone any further.
How do I a) clean this up without going through and manually ignoring each issue, and b) stop this from happening again?
Thanks!
-
@multitimemachine a noindex tag only really applied to Bing/Google other crawlers etc.. You said you blocked (via wildcard) all robots, are you sure you've not gotten e.g. meta robots that might be different?
help@moz.com might be your best bet for a quick resolution for 'cleaning' the report though I'm still slightly lost as to how your main domain and dev/staging were confused as normally there is a subdomain in the way from my experience, even stranger as bots can't by-pass passwords unless it's your sitemap.xml?sorry I can't get you a direct response but without seeing the site or similar it's hard to diagnose though I'm sure the team at Moz can point you in the right direction .
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
-
Robots.txt blocking Moz
Moz are reporting the robots.txt file is blocking them from crawling one of our websites. But as far as we can see this file is exactly the same as the robots.txt files on other websites that Moz is crawling without problems. We have never come up against this before, even with this site. Our stats show Rogerbot attempting to crawl our site, but it receives a 404 error. Can anyone enlighten us to the problem please? http://www.wychwoodflooring.com -Christina
Moz Pro | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
What SEO tools do you use in conjunction with Moz?
It seems like most people use multiple SEO tools. I am interested in hearing what you use in conjunction with Moz and why. -Stephen
Moz Pro | | martechwiz2 -
I got an 803 error yesterday on the Moz crawl for most of my pages. The page loads normally in the browser. We are hosted on shopify
I got an 803 error yesterday on the Moz crawl for most of my pages. The page loads normally in the browser. We are hosted on shopify, the url is www.solester.com please help us out
Moz Pro | | vasishta0 -
Could my Crawl Error Report be wrong?
HI there, I am using Yoast SEO plugin on a wordpress website. I am currently showing 70 Med priority crawl errors 'missing meta description' on my Moz pro account. This number of missing meta descriptions has increased over the last 6 weeks. But every single page / post / tag / category has both the title and meta description completed via Yoast. I requested a google bot to crawl the site a few weeks ago as thought it perhaps wasn't been crawled and updated. Any idea what the issue might be? Could the Moz report be incorrect for some reason? Or could something be blocking Moz / Google from seeing the Yoast plugin?
Moz Pro | | skehoe0 -
Block Moz (or any other robot) from crawling pages with specific URLs
Hello! Moz reports that my site has around 380 duplicate page content. Most of them come from dynamic generated URLs that have some specific parameters. I have sorted this out for Google in webmaster tools (the new Google Search Console) by blocking the pages with these parameters. However, Moz is still reporting the same amount of duplicate content pages and, to stop it, I know I must use robots.txt. The trick is that, I don't want to block every page, but just the pages with specific parameters. I want to do this because among these 380 pages there are some other pages with no parameters (or different parameters) that I need to take care of. Basically, I need to clean this list to be able to use the feature properly in the future. I have read through Moz forums and found a few topics related to this, but there is no clear answer on how to block only pages with specific URLs. Therefore, I have done my research and come up with these lines for robots.txt: User-agent: dotbot
Moz Pro | | Blacktie
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 My questions: 1. Are the above lines correct and would block Moz (dotbot and rogerbot) from crawling only pages that have numberOfStars=0 parameter in their URLs, leaving other pages intact? 2. Do I need to have an empty line between the two groups? (I mean between "Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0" and "User-agent: rogerbot")? (or does it even matter?) I think this would help many people as there is no clear answer on how to block crawling only pages with specific URLs. Moreover, this should be valid for any robot out there. Thank you for your help!0 -
Campaign Crawl Report
Hello, Just a quicky, is there anyway I can do a crawl report for something in a campaign so I can compare the changes? I know you can do a separate crawl test, but it wont show the differences,and the next crawl date isnt untill the 28th.
Moz Pro | | Prestige-SEO0 -
20000 site errors and 10000 pages crawled.
I have recently built an e-commerce website for the company I work at. Its built on opencart. Say for example we have a chair for sale. The url will be: www.domain.com/best-offers/cool-chair Thats fine, seomoz is crawling them all fine and reporting any errors under them url great. On each product listing we have several options and zoom options (allows the user to zoom in to the image to get a more detailed look). When a different zoom type is selected it adds on to the url, so for example: www.domain.com/best-offers/cool-chair?zoom=1 and there are 3 different zoom types. So effectively its taking for urls as different when in fact they are all one url. and Seomoz has interpreted it this way, and crawled 10000 pages(it thinks exist because of this) and thrown up 20000 errors. Does anyone have any idea how to solve this?
Moz Pro | | CompleteOffice0 -
Is there such thing as a site free from errors?
Or is this a given? I am new to SEO and SEOmoz. One of my campaigns is completley free of errors...the others are a work in progress. Now I realize that SEO is never done, but can a site actually be free of errors? If so... I just gave myself a pat on the back.
Moz Pro | | AtoZion0