SEOMoz Crawl Warnings, do they really hurt rankings?
-
SEOMoz reports 250 crawl warnings on my site. In most cases its too long title tags, with 4 of them its missing meta description.
SEOMoz says it will hurt my rankings? However, I'm sure a recent whiteboard Friday contradicted this.
So what is it?
-
This may be the video, Matt Cutts said, the #1 mistake people make in SEO is crawlability
He states that crawability biggest step, then great content after thet marketing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6xxcQdAHbIBing also suggests crawlability is important.
Listening to Duane Forrester from Bing he often mentions trust in relation to SEO violations. The wrong use of redirects and canonical tags, errors and wrong dates in sitemaps, and other violations all lead to a loss of trust.
This is becoming even more important with microdata. A simple html error can give completely different meaning to the snippets. Up until now the bots had to find the content and work out if it is visible to the user, but now with microdata content is arranged in objects and being able to find and crawl these objects mean that you need to be free of violations -
I humbly suggest the test you performed is flawed in some manner. Meta descriptions have no direct effect on Google rankings.
If you wish to stretch, you could say that a meta description might influence CTR and other metrics which do affect rankings. In that sense, almost anything can indirectly effect rankings.
-
Meta descriptions do affect ranking. I tested.
-
Matt Cutts himself mentioned in one of his videos that your website's accessibility to Google bot is one of the major things. You want 0 crawl errors and as many pages in Google index as possible.
-
Each warning is for a different metric. Depending on the metric it may affect rankings.
The long title tag warning is an issue which can affect rankings. The best understanding we have of title tags indicates the entire tag gets a fixed weight. If you use a single term such as "SEO" then all of the weight it applied to that single term. If you use a short phrase such as "Improve SEO Rankings" then the weight is divided amongst the three terms (although not evenly).
The title tag carries a lot of weight. If you provide long title tags you are likely losing some of the value and it definitely can affect rankings.
Additionally, the title tag affects Click Through Rate. If you offer a long title tag, it will get cut off by search engines and will likely reduce CTR.
Meta descriptions do not affect ranking (for Google) but they do impact CTR.
Bottom line, the warnings are designed to call your attention to items which should be investigated and/or fixed.
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
-
Why is my page rank disapointing
Hi fairly new here, so just getting used to everything one questions please. Just ran a crawl test of the website and this page http://www.livingphilosophy.org.uk/teaching-philosophy/index.htm came back with a page authority of 1. Other pages have a rank of 18 through 26 scratched my head for a few hours and came up with no ideas. thanks andy
Moz Pro | | livingphilosophy0 -
Massive Drop in Rankings
Hello, My site (www.reynoldsdesignstudio.com) has recently dropped off the map (50+ places) for almost every phrase I was ranking between 3 and 6 on the first page. My main phrases on google were "web design rochester mn", "web development rochester mn" I have been setting up a new web server but have not pointed this domain at that server yet so it shouldn't be anything related there. I also have not updated the site in a couple years (I know that's bad), so it doesn't appear to be a hacking issue either. I was 'hacked' a few years back where I gained a TON of crappy links from China and what-not but it never appeared to affect anything. I'm not sure if that is what is causing the recent drop in rankings. If anyone has any ideas on what could have caused the issue that would be great. According to my GA traffic I had a spike earlier in the month and then it has steadily dropped off. This is consistent with my actual page rankings. Thanks OAsjcHw
Moz Pro | | reynoldsdesign0 -
Bug with seomoz level display?
Is anyone else seeing people's moz levels shown incorrectly? Spotted this yesterday, but I am getting the same today. Lots of people showing as Aspirant who shouldn't be.
Moz Pro | | matbennett1 -
SEOMoz On-Page Report Card
This question is for one of the SEOMoz staff. With the ongoing changes and improvement in algorithms, does the SEOMoz team keep the "On-page Report Card" up to date with best practices?
Moz Pro | | tdawson090 -
Local Rankings Drop?
G'morning! I got a disturbing report this morning that showed seven of our big keywords drop from high on the first page to not in the top 50. After further research I have found that we are now in Google's local cluster, but no longer on the traditional organic results. My question is this, has Google changed something that doesn't allow results in the local cluster AND in the traditional organic listings? I'm assuming that this is the case because we're doing smart SEO and have built these rankings up nicely over time, but then just fell off the face of the earth. I have attached a snapshot of Moz's Ranking History for a few of the keywords, as I assume this will help explain the story. (We're in green). Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks! euxQb kwAqh pUxkC
Moz Pro | | jpretz0 -
How do I retrieve crawl and ranking data about a site from the past?
Hey. One of my main clients has asked to see the crawl data and rankings data for the past eight months. He wants to have tangible evidence of the effects of Penguin. I would like that info too. Is it possible to retrieve that information on a weekly crawl and ranking basis through SEO Moz and if so, how do you do it? I simply want to show a graph, timeline and brief explanation across several main keywords... Help me as you guys always do - You rock Best Ben
Moz Pro | | creativeguy0 -
Crawl test tool from SEOmoz - which URLs does it actually crawl?
I am using for the first time the crawl test tool from SEOmoz and I do not really understand which URLs the tool is going to crawl. First, it says "enter any subdomain" --> why can´t I do the crawl for the root domain? Second it says "we'll crawl up to 3,000 linked-to pages" --> does that mean that the tool crawls all internal links that it can find on the given domain? Thanks for your help!
Moz Pro | | Elke.GetApp0 -
Why is the SEOmoz crawler crawling the old version of our website?
Hello, I'm a new SEOmoz member. On Dec. 2nd, after completely redesigning our website, we migrated to a new hosting company by switching our DNS to the new server. The vast majority of the URLs have changed and we configured redirects of the old URLs to the new ones. Although, this task is not completed yet. After the migration, I created an account on SEOmoz to be able to track our progress and find the issues to fix to optimize our SEO. For some reason, in the SEOmoz reports it is the old URLs that show up. Unless the crawler does not actually crawl the pages and only uses the indexed pages to generate its report, I don't understand how could this possible. Anyone has a clue? When will the new URLs be indexed by SEOmoz and the major search engines? Thanks for your help!
Moz Pro | | Gestisoft-Qc0