Crawlers crawl weird long urls

[r.nijkamp]

I did a crawl start for the first time and i get many errors, but the weird fact is that the crawler tracks duplicate long, not existing urls.

For example (to be clear):

there is a page: www.website.com/dogs/dog.html

but then it is continuing crawling:
www.website.com/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html

what can I do about this? Screaming Frog gave me the same issue, so I know it's something with my website

[WesleySmits]

Are you somehow linking to www.website.com/dogs/dog.html from the page itself? There could be something wrong with that link.
I made a small mistake not so long ago with a redirection plugin. I told it to go to domain.com. This plugin was looking at the base + what i told it to. So it went to: domain.com/domain.com. Perhaps you made a similar mistake.

Maybe you can send me the URL and i can take a look at it?

[r.nijkamp]

That is a good one! It's true that I have the same linking to the page itself. I will remove all that kind of links first and crawl again. I'll keep you in touch!

[PaddyDisplays]

I think Screaming Frog will tell you the page it found the weird url, then you can check the source, and find out whats producing that link.

[WesleySmits]

You don't necessarily have to remove the link. As long as you can verify that it directs to the right page.

But curious to see what caused the problem

[r.nijkamp]

please be free to check: http://tinyurl.com/lox7le9

[WesleySmits]

Which URL(s) is/are causing problems?

[r.nijkamp]

I can't see any source:

The pages are like:

| URL | www.website.com/page/ |
| Status Code | 200 |
| Status | OK |
| Type | text/html; charset=utf-8 |
| Size | 55811 |
| Title |   |
| Level | 10 |
| In Links | 9 |
| Out Links | 38 |

[r.nijkamp]

every link, except the hompage itself

bugurl.png

[PaddyDisplays]

ok I did a quick screaming fog and I think I have an idea, you just have to follow the breadcrumbs

You said in you example "In Links 9", you need to find out what those pages are and follow it back to the point of origin As I think its just one bad link that cause this nested link effect.

eg

http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/OverOdin/OverOdin/OverOdin/HeutinkICT.aspx

is being linked from

http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/OverOdin/OverOdin/StationtoStation.aspx  (as well as others)

You just have to follow that trail till you find the source of the problem

[PaddyDisplays]

OK found one problem

on this page

http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/ReindersICT.aspx

you have a link to

http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/OverOdin/LesscherIT.aspx

which i think should be

http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/LesscherIT.aspx

[WesleySmits]

I see a link to http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/OverOdin/HeutinkICT.aspx from http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/ReindersICT.aspx.

It's the bottom left block which causes this link. This way you will get a big nesting effect.

[r.nijkamp]

Wow, Big mistakes are made one Home

maybe because of the .aspx. extension? alle pages have seo-friendly urls

Thanks Wesley and Paddy Displays

[r.nijkamp]

Answer from Screaming Frog!

The reason the SEO spider is crawling these URLs, is due to incorrect relative linking on the site from the login URL.
It's actually when the spider crawls the login page, http://www.website.com/login?returnurl=%2F which then leads to this URL http://www.website.com/Home/ctl/SendPassword?returnurl=http:/www.website.com/ and then this /home/ sub directory URL http://www.website.com/Home/ctl/page/dogs.aspx which links to http://www.website.com/Home/ctl/page/page/dogs.aspx and so on and so forth. This is the path to the incorrect relative linking (attached for you).

To stop this, you can correct the incorrect relative linking, or easier, simply exclude the login page.