Long title problem
-
I'm getting an incredible number of 4xx errors and long titles from a small website (northstarpad.com); over 13k 4xx errors and almost 20k "title element is too long". The number keeps climbing, but the site shouldn't have more than a couple hundred pages. When I look at the 4xx errors they are clearly being generated by some program since they have multiple and repeating keywords.
Here's an example:
I looked at the ftp files and plugins and couldn't see anything that could cause it, but I'm a beginner so no surprise there. Any suggestions where to look or how to fix this?
-
Thanks!
-
I can point you towards the best places online to find wordpress developers;
- https://clarity.fm/browse/technology/wordpress
- https://www.odesk.com/o/profiles/browse/skill/wordpress/
- http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/find-wordpress-developer-designer/
Try those!
-
Hello Dan,
I've sent your message to a few web developers who apparently don't have a clue. Any suggestions on someone who could fix this?
Thanks!
-
Thanks a bunch Dan! I'm still clearly a neophyte, but am learning as I go so I appreciate your detailed responses. I'll get someone to work on the URLs right away.
It's also good to know Screaming Frog's limitations for the freebie.
-
I just wanted to clarify that the SEO plugin has nothing to do with this, and also turning all in one on/off will probably not fix anything.
Either you may have the free version of Screaming Frog which limits to 500 URLs, or you may need to adjust crawl settings - my crawl definitely was heading towards the 57k
-
The root of your issue is that there are links that are coded incorrectly
--> http://screencast.com/t/ndeKw3PL
which is resulting in infinite crawling of pages that do not really exist, and thus the same duplicate/long title tags.
For example this page is a good URL: http://northstarpad.com/category/business-portrait-metro-detroit/
But as shown in my screenshot the "Pet Photography" image links to: http://northstarpad.com/category/business-portrait-metro-detroit/pet-photography// which is a bad URL and NOT http://northstarpad.com/pet-photography/ which is where it should link.
Essentially your links should be "absolute" URLs (which show the full file path) not "relative"
--> http://screencast.com/t/koL5QX9B
You'll need to pass this to a web dev who knows how to edit your WordPress theme files.
-
I crawled the site with Screaming Frog and it only showed 475 pages instead of the 57k+ from Moz, and none of them had 404 errors. Is it possible that Moz is crawling our WordPress pages? I looked in our settings for a way to exclude that URL, but couldn't see where to do it.
We'll also try deleting/reinstalling the All in One SEO pack to see if that helps.
-
Thanks a bunch Nakul! I'll let you know if any of your suggestions help me find the problem.
-
Looks like a problem with Wordpress. Are you using any SEO Plugins like Yoast or something ? I'd suggest reaching out to your Wordpress Guy and have them look into it. It's clearly an issue, and needs to be fixed. You can also download Screaming Frog SEO Spider and crawl your website with it to see where Google is finding these links from. It could also be an issue with your Theme or Permalinks. These are the only areas I can think of. You are using the latest version of Wordpress, so you are good from that point of view. So has to be a Plugin, Theme or your Permalinks settings.
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
-
Negative Effect of Duplicate Title Tags
Hi guys, I'm trying to figure out if one my problems with search rankings might be a result of 2 of my main pages (home page and tier 2 page linked to main menu) have the same title and description tags. Let's say my keyword is 'building paper airplanes'. The url for my homepage is http://domain.com and the Title Tag is "Building Paper Airplanes I Domain". My tier 2 page url is http://domain.com/building-paper-airplanes and the Title tag is "Building Paper Airplanes I Domain". The home page is more of an introduction page before the user gets into the instructions on the tier 2 page. Can anybody advise if this might be having a negative affect on my search results for the search term 'building paper airplanes'? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Rogs.SEO0 -
A problem with duplicate content
I'm kind of new at this. My crawl anaylsis says that I have a problem with duplicate content. I set the site up so that web sections appear in a folder with an index page as a landing page for that section. The URL would look like: www.myweb.com/section/index.php The crawl analysis says that both that URL and its root: www.myweb.com/section/ have been indexed. So I appear to have a situation where the page has been indexed twice and is a duplicate of itself. What can I do to remedy this? And, what steps should i take to get the pages re-indexed so that this type of duplication is avoided? I hope this makes sense! Any help gratefully received. Iain
Technical SEO | | iain0 -
Automate process for naming page titles?
Hi everyone, I'm new to the Moz community, but really loving it. I'm hoping some of you more experienced experts may be able to answer what is probably a pretty basic question. I'm working for a non-profit client and I used the SEOMOZ tool to run a report on their site errors. I learned that the website has 5,432 duplicate page titles. They had their website redesigned last year before I started working with them and it appears that the developers didn't take into a account the need to provide unique page title names to each page. While it may make sense to go in to add custom page titles to a handful of the pages for the site, the vast majority of the pages are allocated to products (e-commerce). Is there a script that the developers could add that would automatically add page unique page titles based on say, the title of the product? Here are a few URLs to help you get a sense of what we're dealing with. homepage: www.creativityexplored.org example level two page: http://www.creativityexplored.org/artists/douglas-sheran example product page: http://www.creativityexplored.org/shop/original-art/prints/2776/profile-of-a-lady Thank you so much for any advice you can offer. Best, Linda
Technical SEO | | LindaSchumacher0 -
Problem with duplicate content
Hi, My problem is this: SEOmoz tells me I have duplicate content because it is picking up my index page in three different ways: http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/ and http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/index.php Can someone give me some advice as to how I can deal with this issue? thank you for your time, louandel15
Technical SEO | | louandel150 -
Duplicate Page Titles
I had an issue where I was getting duplicate page titles for my index file. The following URLs were being viewed as duplicates: www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/index.html www.calusacrossinganimalhospital.com/ I tried many solutions, and came across the rel="canonical". So i placed the the following in my index.html: I did a crawl, and it seemed to correct the duplicate content. Now I have a new message, and just want to verify if this is bad for search engines, or if it is normal. Please view the attached image. i9G89.png
Technical SEO | | pixel830 -
Problem with canonical url and session ids
Hi, i have a problem with the following website: http://goo.gl/EuF4E Google always indexes the site with session-id, although i use canonical url in this page. Indexed sites: http://goo.gl/RQnaD Sometimes it goes right, but sometimes wrong. Is it because we separate our session-id with ";" as separator? In the Google Webmaster Tools, i can´t choose jsessid as a parameter, so i think google does not recognize this. But if we have to change it (f.e. ? as separator) we have to spend many days in programming. Any ideas? thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | tdberlin0 -
Product ratings causing 302 redirect problem
I am working on an ecommerce site and my crawl report came back with 7000+ 302 redirects and maxed out at 10,000 pages because of all the redirects. The site really only has maybe 1500 pages (dynamic content aside). After looking into it a little more I see it is because of the product rating system. They have a star rating system that kinda looks like amazons. The only problem is that each star is a link to a dynamic address that records the vote and then 302's back to the original page the vote was cast from. So virtually every page on this site links out anywhere from 15 to 45 times and 302's back to itself, losing virtually all of its PR. Am I correct in that assumption or am I missing something? I don't see the links being blocked by robots.txt or noindex, nofollowed. Also it is an anonymous rating system where a rating can be cast from any category page displaying a product or any product page. To make matters worse every page links to a printable version which duplicates the issue by repeating the whole thing over again. So assuming I am correct that is site has a major PR leak on virtually every page, what is the best recommendation to fix this. 1. Block all of those links in robots.txt, 2. no index, nofollow these links or 3. put the rating system behind a submit button or disallow anon ratings 4. something else??? Looking at their product ratings on the site virtually everything is between 2-3 starts out of 5 and has about the same number of votes except less votes on deeper pages. I dont believe this is real at all since this site gets almost no traffic and maybe 1 sale a week, there is no way that any product has been rated 50 times. I think the crawler is voting as it crawls and doing it 5 times for every product which is why everything is rated 2.5 out of 5. This is an x-cart site in case anyone cares. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | BlinkWeb0 -
Problem with my site
the site is casino.pt we created the site 7-8 month ago, we started to push it by good and natural links (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.casino.pt/a!links!!filter!all!!source!external!!target!page), links in sites with content rich and most of them related to gambling and sport topics. During the first 3-5 months, the rankings were better and better, after the 6 months, the site lose all its rankings. Aditional details http://www.casino.pt/robots.txt http://www.google.pt/#hl=pt-PT&source=hp&biw=1280&bih=805&q=site:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.casino.pt&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&fp=2651649a33cd228 no critical errors in google webmaster tools any idea how can I fix it? thanks
Technical SEO | | Yaron530