Why can no tool crawl this site?

[richdan]

I am trying to perform a crawl analysis on a client's website at https://www.bravosolution.com

I have tried to crawl it with IIS for SEO, Sreaming Frog and Xenu and not one of them makes it further than the home page of the site. There is nothing I can see in the robots.txt that is blocking these agents.

As far as I can see, Google is able to crawl the site although they have noticed a significant drop in organic traffic.

Any advise would be very welcome

Regards

Danny

[Bryan_Loconto]

Interesting. I verified the robots file and tried running through screaming frog... nothing. I' will dig into this with my dev team to try and get you an answer asap.

[DeanAndrews]

Hi Danny,

Have you looked at the site via http://web-sniffer.net/

It would appear that the home page is just a JavaScript redirect.

I was redirected to https://www.bravosolution.com/cms/us which then could seen via Sreaming Frog.

The reason for my (default) redirect is given by web-sniffer as:

DEFAULT CORPORATE
  if ( path == '' ) {
    path = '/cms/us

[richdan]

Cheers Bryan - much appreciated. It's driving me crazy!

[richdan]

Yes, it should redirect you to the correct country version based on your IP. But I still can't crawl the site from the home page

[CleverPhD]

To expand on Dean's point.

If you look at the source code on https://www.bravosolution.com/ you get a bunch of JavaScript (shown below).  It is basically looking at the users location and the sending them to the appropriate version of your website based on country.  This is why here in the US we are sent to https://www.bravosolution.com/cms/us

Many spiders/tools (and Googlebot was not really good at this until recently) are not good at (or do not do any) crawling and executing on JavaScript so they get stuck when they hit your home page.

If you want to evaluate any of your localized sites, just run those URLs through various tools like screaming frog etc.  You would then ask, "Well, how do I know that my main  https://www.bravosolution.com is working properly for SEO?".  I don't have as much background in how to optimize for international SEO, but you can do a several things to start with.

1. Google anything having to do with Aleyda Solis and International SEO.  She posts a lot of stuff here at Moz and is pretty sharp on this stuff.  There may be a more appropriate way to redirect international clients from your main page that how you are executing.

2. Run your home page through Google Webmaster Tools under Crawl > Fetch as Google.  See what the page looks like

3. Double check your robots.txt to make sure you are not blocking any folders that would contain a JavaScript library.  Based on the code below, I do not see you referencing any external libraries, but if you are dependent on JS to send Google, it would be worth having your developer check things

4. As with everything on what to do, it all depends.  If all of your local country sites are independently ranked and successful, this main website may nor may not be doing you any favors currently if it is just a pass through with no domain authority to start with.  Spend time on step #1 to see if there is anything else worth doing.

Cheers!

name="description" />

[DeanAndrews]

Yes that's what I said CleverPhD, I just couldn't type that fast today.

Only joking Thanks for expanding on the subject.

[richdan]

Really helpful and much appreciated - many thanks!

Danny

[spencerhjustice]

I would look into finding a method to redirect via your server rather than with javascript. This will ensure that bots can properly crawl your site.

I would also add hreflang tags which should help Google with the multiple language versions of the site.

Also in the short term you may want to do something like add a link or a delayed meta refresh just in case someone either has javascript disabled or is using script blocking extensions. This will make sure they at least see something instead of a blank page.