Moz reporting reliable?

[SSFCU]

I have been working with our MIS department on addressing our errors on duplicate content and titles caused by parameter URLs. MIS insists that they have solved the problem with canonical tags, which are in place. They said they were getting warnings from Google and Bing, but that after they put the canonical tags in place, those went away.

They are questioning the Moz reports, suggesting that I instead rely on SEO Toolit by Microsoft. (As an aside, we are using SharePoint 2010, crossing our fingers for an upgrade to 2013, which presumably will make a lot of the issues we’re having go away).

So my questions are:

1)      Why are these Moz reports reporting all of these errors that have supposedly been rectified (in 2011)?

2. Do I disregard the duplicate content/title errors on the Moz report and defer to SEO Toolkit, as MIS suggests?

[rhutchings]

Have you also entered params/strings into GWMT to help with the url handling?  I think it would be best to utilizing on-site tagging as well as WMT to make sure you have everything correct.

Canonical tags should do the trick though.  I am not sure that moz takes into account the tagging, and may just see the duplicate entries.  My errors in moz usually seem pretty high sometimes, so I dont think that reflects reality.  The Microsoft Toolkit will essentially be the same thing, but really based on IIS.  Microsoft toolkit may be a bit more accurate, but realize that ultimately its what the search engines see, not what you have in the code or on the server per se.  Sometimes search engines miss certain tags or cues or dont fully follow server settings, etc.. WMT should be your ultimate source for errors and crawling, and I would think the microsoft tool would be next most valuable followed by moz.

[SSFCU]

Update: I received a thorough response from Moz support educating me on the reporting. I was able to cross-reference the duplicate errors with the the rel canonical notifications to eliminate the ones that are okay.

Help Team Ninja Chiaryn Miranda brought to attention a problem that we did have, and I was able to cull through the errors and nail down which ones needed to be fixed.

Couple of excerpts of her help (with her permission). I am especially excited about the dismiss error tool that will be coming out someday. Thank you Chiaryn!

"We prefer to provide data that takes the tack of "rather be safe then sorry" and report on the issues to the highest degree of error that we have seen Google penalize a site for so it is sometimes true that they are not as strict as our tools. It isn't a bug in our system that shows these errors; it is just that we have decided to show errors that Google may consider at their strictest level of penalization."

_____________

"Our software is definitely meant as a guide of things to look at on your site and not an absolute set of rules that are required for success in SEO. Even our in-house SEO doesn't expect to ever get our own list of errors and warnings down to zero, she uses our crawl diagnostics more as a meter for any huge changes to the errors that might indicate a problem on the site. There are always things that aren't able to be corrected on a site, but we still report on them because it is a snapshot of your site architecture and we think it is important to share that. Duplicate content is an especially difficult issue because Google isn't consistent about how they penalize for it. Also, while the search engines don't index pages that have a canonical tag pointing to a different URL, we include them in the errors when they show as duplicates of any other URL that isn't in the canonical tag because that indicates an issue between the canonical URL and the other duplicate. We do still note which pages have canonical tags on them in the notices section of the report.

In the future, with our Moz Analytics platform, we will actually be adding the ability to dismiss error notifications that you fell aren't significant to the specific SEO plan you are implementing on your site, but that may still be a few months out."