Should I worry about errors MozBot finds but is not on my sitemap?
-
MozBot crawled a found a couple errors that isn't included on my sitemap plugin, such as duplicate page content on author pages.
Should I worry about things not on my sitemap?
-
Yes, I would fix every thing that is or could be a problem, it is hard to rank, and you dont weant anything working aginst you.
-
Whether a page is or is not included in your sitemap is irrelevant. Search engines will perform a normal crawl of your site based on the navigation and links for your site. If any page on your site can be reached from any navigation or link on your site, then search engines can find it.
If the page is not marked with a noindex tag, then search engines may attempt to index the page which would cause a duplicate content issue.
A common cause of duplicate content issues on author pages is caused by a lack of information. An author who has provided a detailed bio produces a nice author page, but other authors may share the absolutely minimum amount of information required by your site to publish, and if there is no content other then a user name that would cause a duplicate content issue.
The preferable solution would be to gather more information from authors. Name, email, social accounts, location, areas of expertise, interests, credentials, etc. If you are unable to do such you can also noindex the pages for those authors.
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
-
Canonical error from Google
Moz couldn't explain this properly and I don't understand how to fix it. Google emailed this morning saying "Alternate page with proper canonical tag." Moz also kinda complains about the main URL and the main URL/index.html being duplicate. Of course they are. The main URL doesn't work without the index.html page. What am I missing? How can I fix this to eliminate this duplicate problem which to me isn't a problem?
Technical SEO | | RVForce0 -
Cannot work out why a bunch of urls are giving a 404 error
I have used the Crawl Diagnostic reports to greatly reduce the number of 404 errors but there is a bunch of 16 urls that were all published on the same date and have the same referrer url but I cannot see the woood for trees as to what is causing the error. **The 404 error links have the structure:**http://www.domainname.com/category/thiscategory/page/thiscategory/this-is-a-post The referrer structure is: http://www.domainname.com/category/thiscategory/page/2/ Any suggestions as to how to unravel this would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Niamh20 -
Exclude Noindex, Followed pages from sitemap?
Hello Everyone! This is a question about my site, which is running on WordPress. Currently, I have category page to have the noindex, follow attributes, as they have little unique content. I do have them currently in my sitemap.xml file, however. Should I remove them from the sitemap since Google technically shouldn't index them? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
Wordpress Website + 404 Errors
Hi everyone, I like to do a bit of auditing for our clients using SEOMoz. Once client that's using a Wordpress website had reported over a couple hundred 404 errors. However, when checking out the links, all the webpages (that I've tested) loaded just fine. Does anyone know why this would be the case? I thought, perhaps, the website might have gone down when it was crawling, but I have no evidence to back this up.
Technical SEO | | ThinkShiftInc0 -
XML Sitemap Issue or not?
Hi Everyone, I submitted a sitemap within the google webmaster tools and I had a warning message of 38 issues. Issue: Url blocked by robots.txt. Description: Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt. Example: the ones that were given were urls that we don't want them to be indexed: Sitemap: www.example.org/author.xml Value: http://www.example.org/author/admin/ My issue here is that the number of URL indexed is pretty low and I know for a fact that Robot.txt aren't good especially if they block URL that needs to be indexed. Apparently the URLs that are blocked seem to be URLs that we don't to be indexed but it doesn't display all URLs that are blocked. Do you think i m having a major problem or everything is fine?What should I do? How can I fix it? FYI: Wordpress is what we use for our website Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tay19860 -
How to find and fix 404 and broken links?
Hi, My campaign is showing me many 404 problems and other tools are also showing me broken links, but the links they show me dose work and I cant seem to find the broken links or the cause of the 404. Can you help?
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Do I need an XML sitemap?
I have an established website that ranks well in Google. However, I have just noticed that no xml sitemap has been registered in Google webmaster tools, so the likelihood is that it hasn't been registered with the other search engines. However, there is an html sitemap listed on the website. Seeing as the website is already ranking well, do I still need to generate and submit an XML sitemap? Could there be any detriment to current rankings in doing so?
Technical SEO | | pugh0 -
406 errors
Just started seeing 406 errors on our last crawl (all jpg related). Seomoz found 670 of these on my site when there were 0 before. I have checked the MIME and everything seems to be in the right order. So could it be that Seomoz-crawler is showing errors that aren't really errors?
Technical SEO | | smines0