Crawl Diagnostics - unexpected results
-
I received my first Crawl Diagnostics report last night on my dynamic ecommerce site.
It showed errors on generated URLs which simply are not produced anywhere when running on my live site. Only when running on my local development server.
It appears that the Crawler doesn't think that it's running on the live site.
For example
http://www.nordichouse.co.uk/candlestick-centrepiece-p-1140.html
will go to a Product Not Found page, and therefore Duplicate Content errors are produced.
Running
http://www.nhlocal.co.uk/candlestick-centrepiece-p-1140.html
produces the correct product page and not a Product Not Found page
Any thoughts?
-
Hi Nordichouse,
Sorry it took awhile for me to get back to you on this.
I agree with the SEOmoz techs, it doesn't matter if it is a crawler or a actual person, if you go to an invalid url you should be redirected as 301 to the actual page. If the product doesn't exist it should not allow for superfluous urls.
So basically what you should have is if the product exist then the site redirects to the correct URL. If it doesn't exist then send any query for that product to the same page and display the oscommerce product not found message. By doing this you prevent the system from creating upteenthousand urls for each product.
If you want to test what I mean you can visit our store a www.rubberstore.com/catalog and try a few urls like:
catalog/nipple-clips-p-1000.html
we don't have a product with the id of 1000 so you'll get redirected to the not found message and the root page
-p-1000.htmlhowever if you try:
catalog/a-fake-url-p-29.html
you'll get redirected to our actual product page matching this product id.Hope that makes since. All this is done with the .htaccess url re-writter I posted above.
-
Don
Yes, that is how it is done and there is no problem with that. The above is just how inbound URLs get processed.
The issue here is how the crawler works. The only possible way for this particular URL to be generated is for a certain parameter to be appended to the URL - and that would be unusual (unless SEOmoz techies tell me different)
Alan
-
Did you ever have a product with the id of 1140? If you look at your products table just check the auto number in the product_id column..
If you did and it was live at some point it could be finding the old product based on the old url it used to have.
If you never made that product live then I don't know how a crawler could of found a product that doesn't exist unless they starting using some technology that I'm unaware of.
Since you said you use OSC this what we use to deal with the problem I outlined above..
Begin Ultimate SEO V2.2d
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On# RewriteBase instructions
# Change RewriteBase dependent on how your shop is accessed as below.
# http://www.mysite.com = RewriteBase /
# http://www.mysite.com/catalog/ = RewriteBase /catalog/
# http://www.mysite.com/catalog/shop/ = RewriteBase /catalog/shop/# Change the following line using the instructions above
RewriteBase /catalog/RewriteRule ^(.)-p-(.).html$ product_info.php?products_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-c-(.).html$ index.php?cPath=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-m-(.).html$ index.php?manufacturers_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-pi-(.).html$ popup_image.php?pID=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-by-(.).html$ all-products.php?fl=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-t-(.).html$ articles.php?tPath=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-a-(.).html$ article_info.php?articles_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-au-(.).html$ articles.php?authors_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
#RewriteRule ^(.)-pr-(.).html$ product_reviews.php?products_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-pri-(.).html$ product_reviews_info.php?products_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-f-(.).html$ faqdesk_info.php?faqdesk_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-fc-(.).html$ faqdesk_index.php?faqPath=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-fri-(.).html$ faqdesk_reviews_info.php?faqdesk_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-fra-(.).html$ faqdesk_reviews_article.php?faqdesk_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-i-(.).html$ information.php?info_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-links-(.).html$ links.php?lPath=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-pm-([0-9]+).html$ info_pages.php?pages_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-n-(.).html$ newsdesk_info.php?newsdesk_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-nc-(.).html$ newsdesk_index.php?newsPath=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-nri-(.).html$ newsdesk_reviews_info.php?newsdesk_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-nra-(.).html$ newsdesk_reviews_article.php?newsdesk_id=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}
RewriteRule ^(.)-po-([0-9]+).html$ pollbooth.php?pollid=$2&%{QUERY_STRING}End Ultimate SEO V2.2d
You may try it to see if it helps fix your issue.
-
Thanks, Don
You are right in your analysis - it is osC, but highly modified by myself. Yes, it does redirect.
That, however, is not the point. On the live site, the URL containing 1140 (for example) is never generated.
The mystery is how the Crawler can find something that isn't there! Magic.
Alan
-
Hi nordichouse,
You may want to check with your CMS provider. The urls are similar to Oscommerce which I'm experienced with, but I can see that isn't an Oscommerce setup. The system should have some sort of URL re-writer to deal with this problem.
The issue that I see is the system actually doesn't care what you type in between .co.uk/ and -p-1140.html
For example try this url to get a valid product..
http://www.nordichouse.co.uk/nipple-clips-p-1000.html
which is the same as
http://www.nordichouse.co.uk/-p-1000.html
But should 301 redirect to: http://www.nordichouse.co.uk/linen-style-collection-p-1000.htmlOscommerce has a URL 301 re-writer that prevents the system for using incorrect URL's I would hope your system does as well.
I'm not trying to avoid helping you, but the without an exact knowledge of how the system handles URL's it generates it is hard to troubleshoot, however since it is a CMS somebody who works on it should already have this knowledge.
My best,
Don
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
-
Unsolved Strange "?offset" URL found with content crawl issues
I recently recieved a slew of content crawl issues via Moz for URL's that I have never seen before For example:
Moz Pro | | HannahPalamara
Standard URL: https://skilldirector.com/news,
Newly identified URL: https://skilldirector.com/news?offset=1469542207800&category=Competency+Management). Does anyone know where the URL comes from and how to fix it?0 -
Question #3) My last question has to do with Some SEOmoz crawl diagnostics -
I recently fixed (or well, I am asking to make sure that this was the right thing to do in my first question posted a few minutes ago), a problem where all of my internal main sidebar category pages were linking using https://, which to my knowledge means SECURE pages. anyways, OSE, and google seem to be not recognizing the link juice. but my rank fell for one of my main keywords by 2 positions about a week after i made the fix to have the pages be indexable. Making my pages properly linked can't be a bad thing right? That's what I said. So I looked deeper, and my crawl diagnostics reports showed a MASSIVE reduction in warnings (about 3,000 301 redirects were removed by changing the https:// to http:// because all the secure pages were re-directing to http:// regular structure) and an INCREASE, in Duplicate Page Titles, and Temporary redirects... Could that have been the reason the rank dropped? I think I am going to fix all the Duplicate Page Title problems tonight, but still, I am a little confused as to why such a major fix didn't help and appeared to hurt me. I feel like it hurt the rank, not because of what I did, but because what I did caused a few extra re-directs, and opened the doors for the search engine to discover more pages that had problems (which could have triggered an algo that says hey, these people have to much duplicate problems) Any thoughts will be GREATLY appreciated thumbed, thanked, and marked as best answers! Thanks in advance for your time, Tyler A.
Moz Pro | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Site Explorer Results - Linking Domains Tab
I have a competitor who has the following Linking Root Domains numbers on the Linking Domains tab and was wondering if some one could explain what the numbers mean? opera.com - 205,515
Moz Pro | | bridgeway04-34677
dmoz.org - 97,752 prweb.com - 198,092 quantcast.com - 115,748 tinyurl.com - 443,540 jquery.com - 57,886 URL: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains?site=www.verypdf.com%2F Thanks, Brad0 -
Can Google see all the pages that an seomoz crawl picks up?
Hi there My client's site is showing around 90 pages indexed in Google. The seomoz crawl is returning 1934 pages. Many of the pages in the crawl are duplicates, but there are also pages which are behind the user login. Is it theoretically correct to say that if a seomoz crawl finds all the pages, then Google has the potential to as well, even if they choose not to index? Or would Google not see the pages behind the login? And how come seomoz can see the pages? Many thanks in anticipation! Wendy
Moz Pro | | Chammy0 -
Did anyone else see "Rel Canonical" drop to zero after their latest SEOmoz crawl?
In the Crawl Diagnostics section of the SEOmoz reports, we get errors in red, warnings in yellow, and notices in blue. After my latest crawl, I saw the "Rel Canonical" part go from about 300 down to 0. Obviously, this isn't right, so I'm wondering if this is a bug that everyone is experiencing. U9W5I
Moz Pro | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Why does my crawl report show just one page result?
I just ran a crawl report on my site: http://dozoco.com The result report shows results for just one page - the home page, but no other pages. The report doesn't indicate any errors or "do not follows" so I'm unclear on the issue, although I suspect user error - mine.
Moz Pro | | b1lyon0 -
Can you help me get started using the crawl diagnostics report?
After getting the crawl diagnostics report for the first time my boss and I looked over it and we have tried to fix the problems but we are stumped.I have tried and watched videos , read books, etc.. but have found nothing to help. I need assistance getting started on improving my website. Can you help?
Moz Pro | | WVInjuryLawyer0 -
Question about when new crawls start
Hi everyone, I'm currently using the trial of seomoz and I absolutely love what I'm seeing. However, I have 2 different websites (one has over 10,000 pages and one has about 40 pages). I've noticed that the smaller website is crawled every few days. However, the larger site hasn't been crawled in a few days. Although both campaigns state that the sites won't be crawled until next Monday, is there any way to get the crawl to start sooner on the large site? The reason that I've asked is that I've implemented some changes that will likely decrease the amount of pages that are crawled simply based upon the recommendations on this site. So, I'm excited to see the potential changes. Thanks, Brian
Moz Pro | | beeneeb0