SEOMoz Crawling Errors

[TRICORSystems]

I recently implemented a blog using WordPress on our website. I didn't use WordPress as the CMS for the rest of our site just the blog portion. So as an example I installed Wordpress in http://www.mysite/blog/" not in the root.

My error report in SEOMoz went from 0 to 22e. The Moz bot  or crawler that SEOMoz uses is reporting a ton of 4xx errors to strang links that shouldn't exist anywhere on the site.

Example:

Good link - http://www.mysite/products.html

Bad link reported by SEOMoz - http://www.mysite/blog/my-first-post/products.html

I've also noticed that my page speed as become much slower as reported by Google.

Does anybody know what could be happening here? I know that typically it's better to install WordPress in the root and use it to control the entire site but I was under the gun to get a blog out.

Thanks

[RobertFisher]

Brandon,

Here is a quick check to try just based on the url you show. Go into posts and see if there are example theme or WP posts or post categories. Remove those. See if that will remove the errant url. Then look in permalinks and insure that you have decided how you want the permalinks structured. My guess is somehow it is in the permalinks. Here is a good description of them and how to set them: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#PATHINFO:_.22Almost_Pretty.22

Hopefully that will help (sorry for the less than in depth)

[mytouchoftech]

Where you installed the blog shouldn't matter as any content in the blog will be structured under the directory you installed it in.  I've run a few blogs out of sub directories with no issue.

If you're comparing your page speed from pre-blog to post-blog, chances are they'll be slower because of the nature of the blog.  Every widget/plugin slows down your loading time, as may a poorly designed theme.  Add the fact that you're using a database to serve your content, it slows down more, especially if you're on a shared hosting platform that has other sites doing the same thing.

As for your 404 error.  Is products.html a page that's outside of the blog directory?  If so, you have to hardcode the http://www.mysite.com in the href or the blog will auto append it's base directory on it.

[TRICORSystems]

I just had a smack upside the head moment. I had all of the links in the main nav as absolute but my links in the footer were all relative. That was giving me my 404 errors.

Hopefully this will get me back on Google's good side. We dropped in the ranks a little for some of our main keywords.