SEOMoz says i have errors but goole webmaster doesnt show them - which one is right ?
-
I have about 350 websites all created in farcry 4.0 cms platform. When i do a site crawl using any seo tool ( seomoz, raven, screaming frog) it comes back telling me I have duplicate titles, description and content for a bunch of my pages. The pages are the same page its just that the crawl is showing the object Id and the friendly URL which is autocreated in the CMS as different pages.
EXAMPLE these are the samge page but are recognised as different in SEOMOZ crawl test and therefore flagged as having duplicate title tags and content ...
<colgroup span="1"><col style="width: 488pt; mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 23771;" span="1" width="650"></colgroup>
|www.westendautos.com.au/go/latest-news-and-specials
<colgroup span="1"><col style="width: 488pt; mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 23771;" span="1" width="650"></colgroup>
| www.westendautos.com.au/index.cfm?objectid=9CF82BBD-9B98-B545-33BC644C0FA74C8E ||
GOOGLE WEBMASTER however does not show me these errors ? It shows no errors at all.
Now i believe i can fix this by chucking in a rel=canonical at the top of each page ? (a big job over 350 sites) But even so - my problem is that the website developers are telling me that SEOMOZ and all the other tools are wrong - that google will see these the way it should, that the object ID's would not get indexed ( although i have seen at least one object id show up in the serps.)
Do i believe the developers and trust that google has it sorted or go through the process of hassling the developers to get a rel=canonical added to all the pages?
(the issue sees my homepage as about 4 different pages www.domain.com/ www.domain.com/home /index AND object id.
-
No i have the webmaster access and its not done there. 345 ??? wow is that coding stuff ?
-
I had a think about what your developers said about not erring in Google WMT, and I there is some truth in that as I assume they have exclude the parameters in WMT. But this is the poor mans way of fixing such things. You need to do this at the source for all search engines.
That was probably the most urgent problem the site had, but all up I found 345 violations all up.
If you want me to send you a detailed report email me mosley@thatsit.net.au if you want any help with IIS I can give you some help. -
I have 350 franchise type businesses. Independant but have the marketing etc done for them I inhertied them this way. I am adressing the www to non www canonical issue seperately to this 'friendly url + objectID" canoncal issue. Yes all 350 of them were pretty much duplicates and i am slowly working towards them all being fixed and individualised. I know I can fix it by putting in a rel=canonical but I am looking for some support so that when i go back to the developers they cant just fob me o with some excuse that i dont understand. I have a real hard time to get some of these pages to rank and i sincerely beleive that it is no in my content ( which is in my control ) but coding errors which are holding some of them back ( which is somewhat out of my control) i had to push just to be able to write a page title that wasnt automatically used as the paragraph heading on the page 0_o
Oh and i have addressed the domain canonical via webmaster, which obviously doesnt solve ii for bing - but thanks to the awesome tutorial on your site http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-domain-name-issue I know what i have to ask the developers for
now ! I do have access to the IIS but with onlylimited knowledge about the whole set up I am afraid of screwing something up - but that shows that with the right plugin it EASY to fix !! thank you so much !!
-
I did find out, his web sites are a chain of auto shops called Repco here in australia
-
I would also like to ask why you have 350 sites,
I was going to ask that too but didn't want to seem like a wise guy if the OP has 700 people workin' on 'em.
-
No CMS is perfect, but you can cetainly build a site free from any of these issues, i get a perfect score on every site i build using teh Bing SEO Toolkit, wich finds ever viollation that bing finds.
-
As one assuie to anouther, your deveopers are just not up to it.
I scaned your site, with software from bing that sees the exact same violations as bing.
and for a small site it has a lot of issues.
here is the same error SEOMoz foundThe page with URL "http://www.westendautos.com.au/index.cfm?objectid=9CF82BBD-9B98-B545-33BC644C0FA74C8E" can also be accessed by using URL "http://www.westendautos.com.au/go/latest-news-and-specials".
Search engines identify unique pages by using URLs. When a single page can be accessed by using any one of multiple URLs, a search engine assumes that there are multiple unique pages. Use a single URL to reference a page to prevent dilution of page relevance. You can prevent dilution by following a standard URL format.more on teh error http://perthseocompany.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-page-contains-multiple-canonical-formats
You problems go deeper still, you have domain name canonical issues, this is a big one and a obvious one your developers should of not let get by
if your site can be resched by www and non www without 301 redirecting the SE will see the sites as 2 seperate sites, and you rank will be split
I would also like to ask why you have 350 sites, are you saying they are duplicates of this one www.westendautos.com.au
-
No tool is 100% accurate in the SEO world.
If Google webmaster tool doesn't detect any error today that doesn't mean there is no error at all.
rel=canonical is a perfect solution and go for it.
-
I agree with you about Joomla, It is awful in my experience for creating duplicate content issues.
-
No big deal, these URLs can be generated if you are using a non SEO friendly CMS. This happens to me when I was using Joomla (Joomla is not bad but It didn’t worked out well for me!).
The simple solution to this is download the CSV from screaming frog and go to these pages and set rel=canonical to the page so that Google if crawling, knows what page contains the original data that crawlers should be looking for.
On the other hand it’s a good idea to look in to some good SEO friendly CMS.
-
...my problem is that the website developers are telling me that SEOMOZ and all the other tools are wrong...
Trust developers/designers for making things look good - if you like their style.... but when it comes to SEO you need to have your head examined if you are going to listen to your developer instead of trusting SEOmoz.
Here's something every professional SEO knows.... developers/designers generate a lot of business for SEOs (and lose a lot of money for webmasters) because they don't understand search engines, change all of your URLs, hide text because it stinks up their design, want to make your entire site in images, create navigation bars that spiders can't crawl, allow session id's to generate duplicate content and suck up all of your linkjuice.... I could go on and on here... You must be very careful and watch what they are doing - closely.
Do i believe the developers and trust that google has it sorted or go through the process of hassling the developers to get a rel=canonical added to all the pages?
lol.... I don't think that "hassling" is a very good word. I would either be kicking their asses or firing them and getting a different developer who understand who owns the website!!!
Sometimes you have to assert yourself when somebody is going to screw up one of your websites. If they were trashing one of my good sites I would exert my authority as owner of the site. If it is a choice between my site and their opinion... they lose swiftly.
Now i believe i can fix this by chucking in a rel=canonical at the top of each page ?
Great, you know what to do.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
A tale of two pages - one ranks great and one doesn't - but they are set up the same way
Hi everyone, First time poster 🙂 I will keep it simple - we have two pages on our website that are set up in the same way (or so we think) but achieve vastly different search engine rankings. We have spent weeks trying to figure out why this should be the case, but to no avail. Perhaps you guys can do a little diagnosis and see what we are missing: for search term: used machine tools www.machinetoolsonline.co.za/buy-used-machine-tools Is working well for us. for search term: new machine tools www.machinetoolsonline.co.za/buy-new-machine-tools is a disaster 😞 In fact, Google ranks our home page which is optimised for other terms, higher. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Delorentis210 -
Keyword analysis - error with difficulty %
Hello everyone! Edge of all, I like and I use very often the "Keyword analysis" tool . However, recently, I have some difficulty to rely on the difficulty % of the keywords I've added. As an example I entered as keywords for a french speaking client, words with a geographical reference. It gives me a percentage too high because I am almost convinced that it would probably not be difficult to work with. My question is: is there any known errors with keywords georeferenced French (google canada - english) and also what to trust when I want proof of the difficulty of a keyword in case of some errors may occur in the tool.
Moz Pro | | PTech-1885830 -
Does SEOMoz ever work?
Hi, I've signed up for the free 30 day trial and I'm on the edge of not actually subscribing to the service. I go through the Q & A boards which I find really interesting and hope I can add value there in the future, but the tools interest me more (and this is where the issue lies. Do they ever work? The Keyword difficulty tool just constantly says to come back in 20 minutes and I don't think the Rank Tracker has worked for at least half my freebie 30 days. Have the tools always been this flaky or is it a blip?
Moz Pro | | orlandovisiting1 -
SEOmoz Keyword Ranking - Does it work for local search?
I was just wondering how SEOmoz calculates keyword rankings up and down every week. Shouldn't there be a way to have SEOmoz calculate rankings on a Local and Non-Local Basis? For example I have "Local Dentist" as a keyword in SEOmo for my dental client. SEOmoz shows that we are not in the Top 50. | Local dentist Keyword History Ranking Analysis | Not in Top 50 | Moved unknown 0 spaces | Not in Top 50 | Moved unknown 0 spaces | Not in Top 5 | If I change my location in Google browser to the zip of where the office is located, we
Moz Pro | | Czubmeister
show up in position 14(for the home page) & 15 (for an inside page) How can I show the keyword rankings to my client if the keyword ranking report doesn't reflect searches done in my clients local area?0 -
How to get seomoz to re-crawl a site?
I had a lot of duplicate content issues and have fixed all the other warnings. I want to check the site again.
Moz Pro | | adamzski0 -
SEOmoz mobile search keyword tracking?
Does anyone know if we can expect keyword rank tracking in Google mobile? It would be a cool feature for SEOmoz Pro. Does anybody know of any reliable software that does this at the moment?
Moz Pro | | A_Q0 -
Do you have a testimonial for us? SEOmoz wants to hear them!
Hi everyone! Hope you don't mind me using Q&A to ask for your feedback, but we are looking for testimonials from PRO members on our tools, web app, and resources. These testimonials will be laced throughout the site on a variety of pages and will include -- your name, company, and possibly a photo {smile!} If you are willing to give one, please feel free to either email me -- joanna@seomoz.org, or leave in the comments below. We only need a line or two. Anything about what you think of our tools, how they have helped, etc., would be great! Thank you in advance, and I assure you this will not be a regular use of Q&A! We really appreciate your help and feedback everyone. #mozhug Joanna
Moz Pro | | JoannaLord2 -
When using Wordpress, why does it show up so many meta data errors on here and on google webmaster? A list of do's would be good?
Using wordpress is a good CMS, yet there sre so many meta data errors occuring, is there a list of what to look out for and good practices when using wordpress?
Moz Pro | | CosmikCarrot0