September's Mozscape Update Broke; We're Building a New Index

[Mysites]

Hey Rand, is this why my crawl reports are saying that i have some 404 client errors on pages where I can't see any issues? Or is this another issue that I'm incurring?

Thanks in advance

[DavidLee]

Hi Lehia

Crawl reports are separate from our Mozscape indexes. Also any delays with our index only impact the ability to access new data. With your crawl reports I have a suspicion the URLs with the 404s are ones with trailing slashes e.g. domain.com/ and not domain.com

If not, send us your account info and some examples at help@moz.com and we can take a look!

[DmitriiK]

Hello, Rand. I just noticed that yesterday new update was scheduled for October 8th. And just now it says October 14th! What's going on? I hope it didn't break again...

[randfish]

It didn't break, but it is taking longer to process than we hoped. Very frustrating, but we have a plan that, starting in a few more weeks, should get us to much more consistent index releases (and better quality ones, too).

[DmitriiK]

Thanks!

I have been noticing for quite some time that last minute changes in update release dates are becoming "normal". Is there way you guys can make those changes in update dates be announced earlier than on the expected update release date?

[randfish]

Sometimes yes. Sometimes, we don't know until we reach the last stages of processing whether it's going to finish or take longer. We're trying to get better at benchmarking along the way, too, and I'll talk to the team about what we can do to improve our metrics as an index run is compiling.

[DmitriiK]

Thanks for clarifying!

[inkyj]

It's been about a month since the last update on this and just curious if there's any news on the progress?  I'm still seeing the same results in OSE that I've been seeing for the last couple of months so it appears it's not fixed yet, but is there any indication of when it might be?

[DmitriiK]

The same story here. Quite honestly, I think that last index was very much messed up, probably due to broken index before that. So, I gave up on it and simply waiting for next scheduled one - on 11/17.

[Joe.Robison]

Gotcha - makes a lot more sense now. Moz's DA/PA is clearly the gold standard that most in the industry rely on, but I didn't realize the extent of the processing required to make that happen. Even more props to Moz for the BHAG of taking on such a complex task all these years.

[randfish]

I hope we might actually have that 11/17 index out a little bit early. We've made a lot of fixes and optimizations, and, fingers crossed, it looks (so far) like it's making a difference in terms of speed to index processing completion.