How do crawl errors from SEOmoz tool set effect rankings?

[Gabe]

Hello -

The other day I presented the crawl diagnostic report to a client. We identified duplicate page title errors, missing meta description errors, and duplicate content errors.

After reviewing the report we presented it to the clients web company who operates a closed source CMS. Their response was that these errors are not worthy of fixing and in fact they are not hurting the site.

We are having issues getting the errors fixed and I would like your opinion on this matter.

My question is, how bad are these errors? Should we not fix them? Should they be fixed? Will fixing the errors have an impact on our site's rankings?

Personally, I think the question is silly. I mean, the errors were found using the SEOmoz tool kit, these errors have to be effecting SEO.....right?

The attached image is the result of the Crawl Diagnostics that crawled 1,400 pages.

NOTE: Most of the errors are coming from Pages like

blog/archive/2011-07/page-2

/blog/category/xxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxxx/page-2

testimonials/147/xxxxx--xxxxx

(xxxx represents information unique to the client)

Thanks for your insight!

c9Q33.png

[Cornel_Ilea]

Just send your client this:

1. Missing Meta Description

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

http://www.highrankings.com/metadescription

2. Duplicate Page Title

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

3. Title Element too Long

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/long-title-tags

4. To many On-Page Links

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

5. Duplicate Page Content

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

6. Long URL

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo

http://www.johnfdoherty.com/lessons-from-google-about-url-lengths/

7. Title Missing or Empty

http://searchengineland.com/seotable

By the time they finish reading this hey will not argue anymore.

Cornel

[Gabe]

Thanks Cornel!

Trust me, I tried to send this guy all the links that I could find. They keep saying, "Look at our rankings under this keyword....we don't need to fix the errors, you can rank with them."

What do you think? How important are the duplicate title & missing meta description errors? Is this a top priority thing? Or, is it ok to let them slide.

Of course my view is to fix them. I think BING penalizes for on page errors more thanGoogle does.

Thoughts?

Gabriel

[kyleNeedham]

Hi Gabriel,

i believe that Google can handle missing meta descriptions relatively well and will read the page content to create one, however you will miss out on personalizing them to boost click through rates.

I would prioritize fixing the duplicated page titles and content over everything else, even then i don't believe it will make a huge difference as i removed about 2000 errors and warnings from my site a while back and i haven't seen a huge change in traffic or rankings.

Kyle

[Marcus_Miller]

Ultimately, the client is paying you for SEO advice, you are providing advice and they are not acting upon it. Explain to them that whilst non of these issues are massive factors, to be able to provide the best possible advice you need to remove the common errors and be working from a solid standpoint.

I like the quality metric - if a site has these daft problems, then it's quality is lower and it's chance of hitting a threshold for a problem is more likely. If the duplication of pages / titles becomes rampant, then we get closer to a panda type problem.

Simply put, to rank as well as possible, we do everything we can and taking care of the smaller details is an important part of this job so you can do your job properly knowing you are not being held back by simple, easy to fix issues.