MOZ Crawl help

[JessiK]

Our MOZ report says it crawled 1800 pages so it reports a lot of errors based on those pages. We don't have that many pages on our site. What is MOZ crawling? I updated the profile to make sure it crawls the filtered page section of Google Analytics.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Jessica,

What are the errors telling you? If it is a lot of duplicate content type errors it could be an indication that your site is linking to the same pages in multiple ways. So even though you think your site has xx number of pages, to the crawler (and search engines) it actually has more! Not sure what you mean in regards updating the profile to crawl filtered section of google analytics? If you care to give us an example of the errors and your site we might be able to give more details.

[JessiK]

Hi Lynn,

Thank you for getting back to me. Here is an image of our diagnostics with the errors.

myYa7eD.jpg

[JessiK]

By filtered, I meant that we have a profile that filters out employees hitting the site. Sorry, shouldn't have mentioned it because it isn't relevant.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Jessica,

Well that's a pretty good mix

Having a bunch of different kinds of errors like that could be due to a combination of issues, but I would think that first of all you have a duplicate content issue either because your cms is creating it through different urls for things like multiple categories, archive pages and that kind of thing or because you have a server setup issue that is allowing access to the same pages through multiple urls (like www vs non www urls). It might well be a combination of these things accounting for different errors so you are going to need to narrow down the data to find out exactly what is going on.

Download your error report in csv, open it in excel and select all and then do ctrl-windows-L combination. This will put your data into a filterable table. You can then go to the headers and filter (for example) only 404 pages or only duplicate title pages. Once you have filtered for a specific error have a look at the left hand column for which page or pages the problem is appearing on and then the far right hand column to see which page is linking to this page or pages. You will then have a better idea where the problem is and how it is being reached by the crawler and that will guide you on where to look to fix it. If you want to give a couple of example urls a few obvious things might stand out.

Hope that helps!

[Ryan_Watson]

Hey Jessica,

I took a look at your crawl diagnostics and there isn't anything that looks too out of the ordinary. You have 415 duplicate pages, which is over inflating your page count.

Additionally, when I exported your crawl diagnostics CSV I saw a mixture of static URLs and Dynamic URLs. This may mean that you have two coppies of each page being crawled, which could be leading to over inflated page totals. You might want to look at your CMS and make sure that it is not making 2 copies of each page.

Cheers,

Ryan Watson
Business Development Associate | Moz