Crawl test. Bot crawled only 200 or so links when it should have crawled thousands

[Ev84]

Hi everyone,

I just recieved my crawl test report and its only given me 200 or so URL's when my site has thousands, any thoughts?

[RyanKent]

What Crawl Test tool did you use?

Depending on the crawl tool, it may not look at content blocked from your Robots.txt file. You may want to ensure it is configured correctly.

Are there any permission issues? The crawler will look at your site the way a guest would. Any content which requires users to log in would be hidden to the crawler.

Are there any other issues regarding your site's accessibility? Connection or firewall issues? Could a server admin have seen a server performance issue and kicked the crawler before it finished? You can check server logs for this information.

If you check everything and do not locate a definitive cause, I would suggest running the crawl once more and checking the results before pursuing the matter further.

[Ev84]

Hi Ryan,

I used

On-Page Optimization Tools: Crawl Test. However this problem may be deeper than i first thought, as SEOMoz is not able to read any of my site info properly.

Open site explorer cant read it

Linkscape cant read the links. Crawl test isnt read properly, however my server and robots.txt files are fine, theres no blocking attempts from the server. Very strange.

[RyanKent]

What is different about your site? Is it flash or javascript based? Can you share your site URL?

[Ev84]

No, its just regular HTML and PHP.

The link is www.incarmotorfactors.co.uk

thanks

Ev

[RyanKent]

A few notes about your site:

• you are using meta keyords in your header. It offers no benefit and I would suggest removing it. It's not related to your inquiry but is something I noticed.

• your site has a 50 keyword TAG block with the same keywords on every page. This isn't good from a SEO perspective on many levels. You want your keywords to focus the unique content on a given page

-you site pages are likely viewed as all duplicates. I can recognize the main item in the center of the page changes, but would a crawler? Your left and right sidebars are identical on all pages, along with most of your header. The actual content you offer is only a small percentage of the total page.

The large image of the various car parts is not considered as part of the content, aside from the ALT tag.

Look at a random page from your site: http://www.incarmotorfactors.co.uk/content/16-hella-bmw-e60-rear-lamp-set

According to the Analyze tool there are 5975 words on the page. I estimate about 100 of them are unique words addressing your Rear Lamp product, and the remaining 5800+ words are exactly the same as every other product page.

A crawler will see your pages as 98% duplicated data and the result will likely be your site isn't going to be listed. I would recommend a site re-design. Before taking that advice, it would probably be best to hear from others who have a lot more SEO expertise then myself.

[Ev84]

Thank you very much Ryan, the columns on two sides of the page cant be helped as thats, how the site is, only the central content changes. However the duplicate keywords are for the products themselves, for example i sell 50 different BMW oil filters. Theres not much i can do about duplicating keywords as all of the products are very very similar.

I think you might be right about the site redesign....

[RyanKent]

I realize you may not have full control over the site. What I would share is:

"That's how the site is" is not an acceptable response, unless the site owner is satisfied with their current SEO ranking.

The keywords have NOTHING to do with the product being displayed on the page. The link I offered is for a Hella e60 Rear Lamp. The only related in the keyword section is "rear". I am quite certain that is by coincidence.

Your keywords are not dynamically generated to vary with the pages content, nor were they manually altered to fit the pages content. The keyword selection is awful. The numbers "3", "5", and "7" are listed as 3 of the key words.

I want to help you, so don't take this the wrong way. The best thing about that site is it probably qualifies as a textbook case of what NOT to do from a SEO perspective. Perhaps you can appeal to a SEO company to use the site in a case study and turn it around.

[Ev84]

Hi Ryan,

I am the site owner and this is the precise reason im trying to take matters into my own hands.

<meta name="keywords" content="E60,Rear,lamp,set" />

I see what you mean, because this is actually ridiculous, not quite sure how it got into this state either.

Whats that saying, "if you want something done you have to do it yourself" Looks like i have to take a crash course in SEO to sort it all out.

Thanks very much for all your help.