False 5xx Errors for ColdFusion website

[Elchanan]

For several years month after month MOZ crawl reports 5xx errors on many pages. Almost every time all the pages work fine as fa as i could see. Google webmaster tools does not notice any errors.

Could anyone explain how to fix this situation?

Should i get a refund from MOZ?

[dave.kudera]

Hey, thanks for reaching out!

So it's entirely possible for our user-agent to get a response that doesn't reflect the same when you view it in a browser.  Have you checked your server logs for these 5xx errors responding to our user agent "rogerbot" to check if you see it on your end?  If you want to send us an email to help@moz.com, we can take a look into your specific example here, so we can make sure we have access to report on your site properly.

thanks!

[effectdigital]

Unlike 3XX (301, 302 etc) or 4XX (404 etc) errors, 5XX errors are actually highly variable and relate to server errors. A page can give a 5XX error one second and then in a few seconds, return a full page instead. If you encounter high volumes of 'false-positive' 5XX or 0 (time out) errors, it's usually a sign that at a certain time your server is under strain and Moz is crawling it a bit too quickly (thus resulting in false positive 5XX errors)

This could be if Moz decides to crawl your sit too quickly at peak operating time, or if Moz crawls your site when it's running something like a cron job (assuming that the job is handled by the same server which is handling your web requests). There can be many other reasons for 5XX false positives, but this is the most common

You can delay Moz's crawl bot (rogerbot) from crawling your site too frequently:

• https://moz.com/help/moz-procedures/crawlers/rogerbot

See if that helps. Keep in mind the change won't be instant, it may take a few weeks for it to be processed effectively. We had to do this recently for a client's site which was bound to a ridiculously weak hosting environ

Hope that helps!