Crawl Diagnostics 2261 Issues with Our Blog

[Girlstuff]

I just recently signed up for MOZ, so much information.  I've done the walk through and will continue learning how to us the tools.  But I need your help.

Our first moz crawl indicated 2261 issues (447 404's, 803 duplicate content, 11 502's, etc).  I've reviewed all of the crawls issues and they are linked to our Yahoo hosted WordPress blog.  Our blog is over 9 years old. The only issue that I'm able to find is our categories are not set up correctly.  I've searched for WordPress assistance on this topic and cant find any issues with our current category set up. Every category link that I click returns Nothing Found Apologies, but no results were found for the requested archive. Perhaps searching will help find a related post.

http://site.labellaflorachildrensboutique.com/blog/

Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

[MattRoney]

Category pages actually turn up as duplicate content in Crawl Diagnostics _really _often. It just means that those categories are linked somewhere on your site, and the resulting category pages look almost exactly like all the others.

Generally, I recommend you use robots.txt to block crawlers from accessing pages in the category directory. Once that's done and your campaign has re-crawled your site, then you can see how much of the problem was resolved by that one change, and consider what to do to take care of the rest.

Does that make sense?

[CleverPhD]

One wrinkle.  If the category pages are in Google and potentially ranking well - you may want to 301 them to consolidate them into a more appropriate page (if this makes sense) or if you want to get them out of the index, use a meta noindex robots tag on the page(s) to have them removed from the index, then block them in robots.txt.

Likewise, you have to remove the links on the site that are pointing to the category pages to prevent Google from recrawling and reindexing etc.

[MattRoney]

Oh yeah, that's a great point! I've found that the category pages rarely rank directly, but you'll definitely want to double-check before outright blocking crawlers.

Just to check my own understanding, CleverPhD, wouldn't crawlers avoid the category pages if they were disallowed by robots.txt (presuming they obey robots.txt), even if the links were still on the site?

[CleverPhD]

Yes, the crawler will avoid the category pages if they are in robots.txt.  It sounded like from the question that this person was going to remove or change the category organization and so you would have to do something with the old URLs (301 or noindex) and that is why I would not use robots.txt in this case so that those directives can be seen.

If these category pages had always been blocked using robots.txt, then this whole conversation is moo as the pages never got in the index. It is when unwanted pages get in the index that you potentially want to get rid of that things get a little tricky, but workable.

I have seen issues where there are pages on sites that got into the index and ranking but they were the wrong pages and so the person just blocked with robots.txt.  Those URLs continued to rank and cause problems with the canonical pages that should be ranking.  We had to unblock, let Google see the 301, rank the new pages then put the old URLs back into robots to prevent the old URLs from getting back into the index.

Cheers!

[MattRoney]

Awesome! Thanks for straightening it out.

[CleverPhD]

One other thing I forgot.  This video by Matt Cutts

It explains why Google might show a link even though the page was blocked by robots.txt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0

Google really tries not to forget URLs and this video reminds us that Google uses links not just for ranking, but discovery so  you really have to pay attention to how you link internally.  This is especially important for large sites.

[evolvingSEO]

While what Matt and CleverPHD (Hi Paul!) have said is correct - here's your specific issue:

Your categories are loading with "ugly" permalinks like this: http://site.labellaflorachildrensboutique.com/blog/?cat=175 (that loads fine)

But you are linking to them from the bottom of posts with the "clean" URLs --> http://screencast.com/t/RIOtqVCrs

The fix is that Catgory URLs need to load with "clean" URLs and the ugly one should redirect to the clean one.

Possible fixes:

• Try updating wordpress (I see you're on a slightly older version)
• See if you .htaccess file has been modified (ask a developer or your hosting for help with this perhaps)

Found another linking issue:

This link to Facebook in your left sidebar --> http://screencast.com/t/EqltiBpM it's just coded incorrectly. It adds the current page URL so you get a link like this http://site.labellaflorachildrensboutique.com/blog/category/unique-baby-girl-gifts/www.facebook.com/LaBellaFloraChildrensBoutique instead of your Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/LaBellaFloraChildrensBoutique

You can fix that Facebook link probably in Appearance->Widgets.

That one issue is causes about 200 of your broken URLs

[CleverPhD]

Go Dan!