Site less than 20 pages shows 1,400+ pages when crawled

[K.Walters]

Hello! I’m new to SEO, and have been soaking up as much as I can. I really love it, and feel like it could be a great fit for me – I love the challenge of figuring out the SEO puzzle, plus I have a copywriting/PR background, so I feel like that would be perfect for helping businesses get a great jump on their online competition.

In fact, I was so excited about my newfound love of SEO that I offered to help a friend who owns a small business on his site. Once I started, though, I found myself hopelessly confused.

The problem comes when I crawl the site. It was designed in Wordpress, and is really not very big (part of my goal in working with him was to help him get some great content added!)

Even though there are only 11 pages – and 6 posts – for the entire site, when I use Screaming Frog to crawl it, it sees HUNDREDS of pages. It stops at 500, because that is the limit for their free version. In the campaign I started here at SEOmoz, and it says over 1,400 pages have been crawled…with something like 900 errors.

Not good, right?

So I've been trying to figure out the problem...when I look closer in Screaming Frog, I can see that some things are being repeated over and over. If I sort by the Title, the URLs look like they’re stuck in a loop somehow - one line will have /blog/category/postname…the next line will have /blog/category/category/postname…and the next line will have /blog/category/category/category/postname…and so on, with another /category/ added each time.

So, with that, I have two questions

1. Does anyone know what the problem is, and how to fix it?
2. Do professional SEO people troubleshoot this kind of stuff all of the time? Is this the best place to get answers to questions like that? And if not, where is?

Thanks so much in advance for your help! I’ve enjoyed reading all of the posts that are available here so far, it seems like a really excellent and helpful community...I'm looking forward to the day when I can actually answer the questions!!

[AlanBleiweiss]

This is most likely a job for a WordPress programmer because it sounds like there's a major flaw in the site architecture.  Andrew Norcross @Norcross on Twitter, and Joe Hall @JoeHall would be the two people I'd reach out to for guidance if it were me.

[K.Walters]

Thanks, Alan! I'll try contacting those guys!

[mjmorse]

Hey K,

If you could post a screen shot of the Settings>Permalink structure screen in the Wordpress Dashboard, or just copy and paste whatever is written in there in a reply, that might help diagnose the issue.  Also, do you know if the site has moved hosts recently and was re-installed using the Wordpress export & import feature?

[K.Walters]

I don't think the site moved hosts - I'm not the person who created it, but his business is relatively new, so if there was a change it would have been done with very little content on the site.

The permalink structure is custom and looks like this: /blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Would something else be better? Let me know! Thanks!!

[irvingw]

Did you install plugins that might have caused the issue? I would deactivate all plugins and see if it has an effect then turn them on one at a time to see if you can isolate the issue.

If the plugins are not the issue, it might make sense to backup the DB and do a fresh install of WP which isn't hard.

[K.Walters]

Thanks, Irving! I am trying turning on/off the plugins - the person who designed the site used a WP Boxer plugin and Multiple Content Blocks plugin, and that is how the homepage is designed (feeding info from pages/posts) so I was wondering if that could be part of it...but when I turn them off/on that doesn't seem to help. So I'm trying the other plugins too (there are just a couple), and if that doesn't work, I'll try a fresh install!

I also tried changing the permalink structure to just /sample-post/ and that didn't seem to work either...but I'm going to keep working on it!

I haven't tried the Twitter approach yet - because I don't actually have a Twitter account (I'm trying to keep social media from taking over my life) - but if that's where the answers are, I guess I need to get on there!