How is my competition causing bad crawl errors and links on my site
-
We have a compeditor who we are in a legal dispute at the moment, and they are using under hand tactics to cause us to have bad links and crawl errors and i do not know how they are doing it or how to stop it.
The crawl errors we are getting is the site having two urls together, for example www.testsite.com/www.testsite.com and other errors are pages that we do not even have or pages that are spelt wrong or have a dot after the page name.
We have been told off a number of people in our field that this has also happened to them and i would like to know how they are doing it so we can have this stopped
Since they have been doing this our traffic has gone down by half
-
Hi no there is only me who deals with the site. I have put copyright notice on the site but i will read about authorship accorss the site.
-
Hi Diane,
I like the way Ryan thinks! ...but I am hoping we won't have to go to the length of having to resort to a content bomb.
The lesson in a situation like this is to realize that being a good white hat SEO unfortunately means needing an understanding of some of the tactics used by black hats or maybe just a little help from some friends
Since there is obviously an issue with your content being copied, the first thing I would do is to implement Authorship markup across your entire site. By doing this you ensure that any content that is "borrowed" is immediately "outed" to the search engines because it doesn't have an external link from your Google profile page, which acts as verification that you are in fact the author of the content. Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson have given a really easy rundown on implementation in this Google Webmaster Help video
For the moment though, it would be better if you can avoid making any changes to the site until we can identify all of the issues in play.
BTW ... I think I have an inkling of what might be going on here ... is there a programmer or designer who is or has been involved in the development of the site besides yourself?
In the meantime, I'm continuing with a diagnostic based on the information we have and will let you know as soon as I have confirmed my suspicions or otherwise.
Hang in there,
Sha
-
May I suggest planting a "bomb" in your content?
Most thieves are lazy. Rather then create content themselves they steal from others. Their laziness is dependable.
Take a look at their copies and determine what content is and is not being stolen. If they are copying everything including the HTML code and meta tags, you can add canonical tags to your site and other helpful code.
If they are not copying the meta tags, you can add fake content and use the noindex, nofollow tag to protect your site, but provide content which otherwise would cause a site to be removed from Google's index. When they steal the content, it wont have the noindex tag and the site would get nailed.
There are many other possibilities but I am confident you can outsmart them if you try. In addition, be sure to report the site(s) to Google: http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=ts.cs&ts=1114905
Another idea is to copyright your work, thereby protecting it and giving you legal proof the content is yours.
-
thanks for this, will send private message. we have had to redo the site so many times with new content because the content keeps on being stolen by a franchise group who then pass it on to their franchisees.
-
Hi Diane,
Ryan's response is spot on and his suggestions are excellent.
If you can provide the URL(s), then we can take a look and see exactly what is going on with the referring page(s).
If you don't want to share the information publicly in the Q&A, you can private message each of us through your SEOmoz profile page.
If you ever think that someone has access to edit pages on your site without your permission, the first thing to do is to check with your service provider whether there are any active ftp accounts that you are unaware of. I have seen situations before where people have managed to get a "back door" set up and then it is as simple as logging in and changing pages without your knowledge.
Given that this involves a legal dispute, if we can do a proper diagnosis and trace the source of the errors (or if there happens to be a back door in place), then you would be able to:
- issue a cease and desist
- better secure the server against unauthorized access
- Ban any ip addresses identified as malicious
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
You mentioned these are crawl errors. Are you using the SEOmoz crawl report? If so, please look at the "referrer" field. It will offer the page on your site which is providing the bad URL.
If you are willing to share the referring page, we can take a look and possibly provide more detail.
Anyone can create bad links to your site which can appear in Google or Bing WMT. Only someone with the ability to add content on your site can create crawl errors. Either your site is open to user generated content and someone created a bad link, or someone with access to your web server created the content.
-
will do thanks
-
If iit is happniong to many, then maybe its a reason not to suspect them, but like i say go to Bing WMT and have a look at where the links ae comming from.
-
the reason why i know they are behind it, is because other companies in the field of the website have had the same problems and after doing research for our legal team over this matter, we spent time speaking to over 40 people in the field of the website and found it happened to them aswell.
These people are cowboys but hopefully it will all be sorted out soon.
-
I would look in Bing WMT to see where the links are comming from for a start.
i must say also, If you dont know how they are doing it, then maybe you dont know if they are doing it., it may be somthing quite inocent.
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
-
Self Referencing Links - Good or Bad?
As an agency we get quite a few of our clients come to us saying "Ooo, this company just contacted me saying they've run an SEO report on my site and we need to improve on these following things" We had one come through the other day that had reported on something we had not seen in any others before. They called them self-referencing links and marked it as a point of action should be taken. They had stated that 100% of the pages on our clients website had self-referencing links. The definition of self-referencing is when there is a link on a page that is linking to the page you are currently on. So for example you're on the home page and there is a link in the nav bar at the top that says "Home" with a link to the home page, the page you are already currently on. Is it bad practice? And if so can we do anything about it as it would seem strange from a UI point of view not to have a consistent navigation. I have not heard anything about this before but I wanted to get confirmation before going back to our client and explaining. Thanks Mozzers!
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Do bad links to a sub-domain which redirects to our primary domain pass link juice and hurt rankings?
Sometime in the distant past there existed a blog.domain.com for domain.com. This was before we started work for domain.com. During the process of optimizing domain.com we decided to 301 blog.domain.com to www.domain.com. Recently, we discovered that blog.domain.com actually has a lot of bad links pointing towards it. By a lot I mean, 5000+. I am curious to hear people's opinions on the following: 1. Are they passing bad link juice? 2. does Google consider links to a sub-domain being passed through a 301 to be bad links to our primary domain? 3. The best approach to having these links removed?
Technical SEO | | Shredward0 -
Sitemap as Referrer in Crawl Error Report
I have just downloaded the SEOMoz crawl error report, and I have a number of pages listed which all show FALSE. The only common denominator is the referrer - the sitemap. I can't find anything wrong, should I be worried this is appearing in the error report?
Technical SEO | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
Are links in menus to external sites bad for SEO?
We're building a blog on a subdomain of the main site. The main site is on Shopify and the blog will be on wordpress. I'd like to keep the user experience as simple as possible so I'd like to make the blog look exactly like the main Shopify site. This means having a menu in the blog that duplicates the Shopify menu. So is it bad for SEO to have someone click on the 'about us' button in the blog subdomain (blog.mainsite.com) which takes you to the 'about us page' on the main shopify website (mainsite.com)?
Technical SEO | | acs1110 -
Is any know if seomoz update for site crawl.
i belive my site www.breeze-air.com hit by penguin; i found that i had un-natural anchors text and able to remove around 1200 from the 1900 seomoz found. seomoz still shows those anchors - but when i check the link its not there. i removed them 3-4 weeks ago any idea?
Technical SEO | | eoberlender0 -
Does turning website content into PDFs for document sharing sites cause duplicate content?
Website content is 9 tutorials published to unique urls with a contents page linking to each lesson. If I make a PDF version for distribution of document sharing websites, will it create a duplicate content issue? The objective is to get a half decent link, traffic to supplementary opt-in downloads.
Technical SEO | | designquotes0 -
Google Crawler Error / restricting crawling
Hi On a Magento Instance we manage there is an advanced search. As part of the ongoing enhancement of the instance we altered the advance search options so there are less and more relevant. The issue is Google has crawled and catalogued the advanced search with the now removed options in the query string. Google keeps crawling these out of date advanced searches. These stale searches now create a 500 error. Currently Google is attempting to crawl these pages twice a day. I have implemented the following to stop this:- 1. Submitted requested the url be removed via Webmaster tools, selecting the directory option using uri: http://www.domian.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/ 2. Added Disallow to robots.txt Disallow: /catalogsearch/advanced/result/* Disallow: /catalogsearch/advanced/result/ 3. Add rel="nofollow" to the links in the site linking to the advanced search. Below is a list of the links it is crawling or attempting to crawl, 12 links crawled twice a day each resulting in a 500 status. Can anything else be done? http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=94&category=55&color_layered=128&csize[0]=0&fabric=92&inventry_status=97&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=115&category=55&color_layered=130&csize[0]=0&fabric=0&inventry_status=97&length=116&price=3%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=94&category=55&color_layered=126&csize[0]=0&fabric=92&inventry_status=97&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=137&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=8%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=142&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=4%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=137&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=142&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=135&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=128&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=5%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=127&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=4%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=127&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=3%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=128&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=10%2C10http://www.domain.com/catalogsearch/advanced/result/?bust_line=0&category=55&color_layered=122&csize[0]=0&fabric=93&inventry_status=96&length=0&price=8%2C10
Technical SEO | | Flipmedia1120 -
Converse.com - flash and html version of site... bad idea?
I have a questions regarding Converse.com. I realize this ecommerce site is needs a lot of seo help. There’s plenty of obvious low hanging seo fruit. On a high level, I see a very large SEO issue with the site architecture. The site is a full page flash experience that uses a # in the URL. The search engines pretty much see every flash page as the home page. To help with issue a HTML version of the site was created. Google crawls the Home Page - Converse.com http://www.converse.com Marimekko category page (flash version) http://www.converse.com/#/products/featured/marimekko Marimekko category page (html version, need to have flash disabled) http://www.converse.com/products/featured/marimekko Here is the example of the issue. This site has a great post featuring Helen Marimekko shoes http://www.coolmompicks.com/2011/03/finnish_foot_prints.php The post links to the flash Marimekko catagory page (http://www.converse.com/#/products/featured/marimekko) as I would expect (ninety something percent of visitors to converse.com have the required flash plug in). So the flash page is getting the link back juice. But the flash page is invisible to google. When I search for “converse marimekko” in google, the marimekko landing page is not in the top 500 results. So I then searched for “converse.com marimekko” and see the HTML version of the landing page listed as the 4<sup>th</sup> organic result. The result has the html version of the page. When I click the link I get redirected to the flash Marimekko category page but if I do not have flash I go to the html category page. ----- Marimekko - Converse All Star Marimekko Price: $85, Jack Purcell Helen Marimekko Price: $75 ... www.converse.com/products/featured/marimekko - Cached So my issues are… Is converse skating on thin SEO ice by having a HTML and flash version of their site/product pages? Do you think it’s a huge drag on seo rankings to have a large % of back links linking to flash pages when google is crawling the html pages? Any recommendations on to what to do about this? Thanks, SEOsurfer
Technical SEO | | seosurfer-2883190