SeoMoz crawler giving false positives?

[finalfrontier]

SeoMoz crawler indicated a few times that my site has a duplicate home page error (http://mysite.com and www.mysite.com)

I eliminated the the couple remaining internal links that pointed to http://mysite on a couple pages (all other internal links point to http://www.mysite.com)

I ran the crawl again and it said no errors this time.  I naturally thought the duplicate page error problem was fixed.

However this morning I got the regularly scheduled crawl report from SeoMoz that said again I have those duplicate error pages. No changes were made to any of my site's pages between the crawls.

That makes me wonder if the crawler is providing false positives at times or was wrong when it said on the crawl a couple days ago that I don't have any errors (no duplicate page error).

Now, I don't know what to think.

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

You need to redirect one of your home pages to the other. www.mysite.com is different to the crawl robot as my site.com. In addition to having the issue with seomoz, you are losing serp value for your home page because you are dividing up the SEO value. Do a 301 redirect from one to the other and voila....problem solved.

Please make sure you give me the thumbs up for the help!! Thanks

[Jinx14678]

Hi,

If needed - this is the .htaccess code to help fix this issue; (Make sure and back up .htaccess before making any chages)

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomainhere.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomainhere.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The above code would redirect all traffic from non www to www version of your site fixing dup content issues in that regard

Source ;http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

PS Spaces between lines not needed (funky formatting here)

Hope this helps

[finalfrontier]

My point is the inconsistency in the SeoMoz crawler reports.

I got two SeoMoz crawl reports today - one was the regularly scheduled one which said I have duplicate home pages (as noted) and the crawl I started a couple hours ago said there are no errors.

So...how do you tell which one is right?  Both cannot be since there were no changes to my website pages between the crawls.

thx

[kenneth_martin]

Hey,

I just looked into the issue that you are experiencing with our crawler. The reason the the discrepancy is because you actually have two separate campaigns running for the same site. One is set to crawl the root domain and one the subdomain.

The root domain campaign actually still presents these errors and has week over week but the sub-domain campaign is setup for the www version of your site and that's why these errors are not present, because the crawler won't even attempt to crawl off of www.

It is advisable to perform a 301 redirect as the other commenters mention.

Hope that helps!

Kenny

[finalfrontier]

Thanks - I initially thought that was it.

But if you see my 3rd campaign of the crawl, it runs it for the root domain and it shows no duplicates.

[kenneth_martin]

Hey,

That third campaign is actually a subdomain setup to crawl non-www. No duplicate content errors were presented because there are not any links to follow since all the links contain the subdomain www in them.

Root domain campaigns are distinguished with an astrick before the domain name.

*rootdomain.com

[finalfrontier]

Thanks for the explanation.  Could you answer a couple questions?

1 - If all internal site links go to www.mysite.com (none link to http://mysite.com), how does a duplicate page even happen?  I don't understand how this happened to begin with if I don't have any such internal link to http://mysite.com.

2 - Can you recommend a service who can fix the htaccess page for me to create the 301 redirect?  I'm not sure I want the hosting service doing it and making a mistake.

Thanks!

[kenneth_martin]

Hey,

Our crawler actually requests the page http://mysite.com first but then finds all your links to www.mysite.com

You will want to contact the person responsible for hosting or developing your site in order to make these changes.

Have a great day!

Kenny