Broken Links and Duplicate Content Errors?
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Hello everybody, I’m new to SEOmoz and I have a few quick questions regarding my error reports:
- In the past, I have used IIS as a tool to uncover broken links and it has revealed a large amount of varying types of "broken links" on our sites. For example, some of them were links on my site that went to external sites that were no longer available, others were missing images in my CSS and JS files. According to my campaign in SEOmoz, however, my site has zero broken links (4XX). Can anyone tell me why the IIS errors don’t show up in my SEOmoz report, and which of these two reports I should really be concerned about (for SEO purposes)?
2. Also in the "errors" section, I have many duplicate page titles and duplicate page content errors. Many of these "duplicate" content reports are actually showing the same page more than once. For example, the report says that "http://www.cylc.org/" has the same content as "http://www.cylc.org/index.cfm" and that, of course, is because they are the same page. What is the best practice for handling these duplicate errors--can anyone recommend an easy fix for this?
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Hi Richard.
For the first issue, does your site have over 10k pages? I ask because I believe the crawler has a 10k limit and if you exceed that number any issues on extra pages can be missed.
Otherwise I would recommend inspecting your site in Google WMT. The idea behind any crawl reporting is to locate issues before Google finds them. Since you are just starting here, Google has likely already discovered any issues on your site. I have not found any broken links in WMT which the moz crawler missed so I trust the tool; however, I have not worked with IIS.
For the duplicate page issue, you should ensure only one version of each page is accessible. Determine which URL version is preferred, then either eliminate the other version(s) or 301 redirect them to the primary URL version. In the example you offered, I would suggest http://www.cylc.org/ is the cleaner, preferred version of the URL.
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