What am I supposed to do with all this information?
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I just signed up for SEOMoz, and I have thousands of errors. What am I supposed to do to fix all this? It seems overwhelming.
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Welcome to SEOmoz! Please feel free to ask us about the errors here or to email the helpdesk at help@seomoz.org. Let us know how things are going for you, we'd love to be able to help you.
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Most important point to note... Dont panic.
Take them section by section in chunks, start off at the duplicated content errors as these are arguably the most important. Click the duplicated content errors, then on the first URL it should show how many other URLs are duplicated.
I have uploaded images for 4 steps of how to see which links on your domain have duplicated content.
The reason there is duplicated content on the campaign I took the images from is because the site I am working on is set up to not have Cononical URL tags. The reason your site might have duplicated content issues may well be for the same reason (ie, Google sees these three pages as the same content: http://mysite.com - http://www.mysite.com - http://www.mysite.com/index.php - even though they are all the home page. You just need to tell Google that they are the same page in effect)
Another reason you might have duplicated content is because you may well quite literally have content which looks/reads the same on numerous pages. If you do have content the same on different pages on your site then you should look at changing this as soon as possible and making the content 100% unique.
One last thing to note is that very few websites are perfect and show no errors. If anything, perfect websites look bad to Google because they look too automated and not manually built and optimised.
Sorry if it seems like there is alot to swallow. As stated, take a chunk at a time and don't panic. If you need advice there are some great people on here who would happily offer some support. I am available to offer any community member guidance should they need it, my Skype contact is on my profile, please feel free to use it should you get stuck!
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Rm is right - all you need is to set all things based on priorities:
-duplicate entries (content, title tags etc) as first priority
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get rid of 404 error pages
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TT missing or empty, if it makes sense.
SeoMoz dashboard is doing a fantastic job in providing suggestions on your on page optimization but it doesn't mean you need to solve / address all those suggestions.
We have sites that are performing very good in serps and have 3k+ errors still. We have sites with 0 errors that are not doing well in search visibility - my point is that are a lot of important things outside of those numbers and I would't lose focus - keep your eye on the ball.
Remember that an over optimized site is as bad as a poor optimized site - never go overboard - is not natural and so it's not SEO healthy.
Hope it helps !
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For starters I would look at where your duplicate content is. You will then want to go to these pages to fix those errors. Some of them are as simple as changing the Title Tag to something more specific, and other will require getting rid of a duplicate page that shouldn't exist.
From there you can tackle the harder stuff that may require a web designer's help.
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