Perplexed - Errors increasing, moz rank dropping, conflicting data from other sources. Please Help.
-
Hi there,
I'm in a bit of a bind and could seriously do with some help. For the past month I've been working with a client to resolve errors onsite.
In that period my moz rank has plummeted and my errors (dupe title & content) have increased dramatically. The correlation makes sense, the increase - not so much.
Here's why, screaming frog is reporting that the majority of duplicate titles have been removed or dealt with. I've also got the assurance of the developer that the suggested changes are being implemented.
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the CMS - umbraco - and this is the first time I'm working with this particular developer, so I'm not sure how to gauge progress without using moz tools.
So, here are my immediate questions:
1. Why would I get different results from Screaming Frog and Rogerbot?
2. Has anyone here been in a similar situation and could they recommend areas to watch for errors creeping in?
3. Is there a way of identifying which errors have occurred when? Narrowing it down to the week each error occurred would be good enough.
4. Is anybody aware of any inherent SEO flaws in umbraco or common SEO mistakes made using the CMS?
5. is there anything I could provide you with to help you help me?
6. Do you have a suggestion? I'm pretty stuck.
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Matthew,
Without getting into the specifics of your site, it would seem the first step would be to identify the duplication errors Moz reports to see if they are actually valid, and then determine what is causing them and takes steps to address them.
Within the duplicate content reports, there should be a number listed next to each URL showing the number of other pages with duplicate content. If you click on this number, you'll get a list of URLs.
By comparing these URLs against each other, you can start to identify the problem. Does that make sense? Perhaps you've already taken this step, but it's hard to tell from the question.
If you find that the URLs are fishy, and you suspect a problem with your CMS, it's often helpful to determine where the Moz crawlers discovered the links to these URLs. You can do this by downloading the entire CSV report. In the last column is a URL showing where the link was discovered. Knowing this is often helpful in rooting out problems.
Hope this helps! Best of luck.
-
Hi Matt,
Well I quickly ran it through Xenu (don't have the paid version of screaming frog) and one thing that sticks out immediately is your training registration pages like http://www.cbmtraining.co.za/register.aspx?c_id=1269 and http://www.cbmtraining.co.za/register.aspx?d_id=2249 for example.
There are quite a few of these pages and they all have the same title. You could put the actual name of the specific event in the title tag and that will help. It would also be good to put a bigger description of some sort in the page for each event, otherwise the registration form data looks pretty much like duplicate content even if you have a couple of lines unique for each event on each page now. You have a couple of other duplicate page titles floating around, but sorting out that issue with the registration pages will cut down the numbers a lot and let you focus more clearly on the others.
-
I'm not sure but I think the Moz bot will report dup error even if the page is canonised. If they are canonised then they are fine (and screaming frog is not reporting them). Best thing is to randomly pick some example links its reporting as dups and check them out manually see if they are correct
-
Hi Lynn,
Thank you very much for your assistance. The URL for the site is www.cbmtraining.co.za. If you could give me any pointers I'd appreciate it.
1. I'm using the paid version of SF so I don't think I'm getting varying results because of the number of pages I'm crawling. Could it be something in the settings of SF?
2. Thanks for this tip. That's really handy to know.
3. My gut feel is that something fishy is happening from the Dev's side. None of my other projects are experiencing similar problems and moz are showing an increase in errors, not the decrease I was expecting.
All the best,
Matt
-
Hi Matthew,
It would help to have a url to look at but I can suggest a couple of things to consider:
1. If you are using the screaming frog free version it limits you to 500 pages, the moz scan will go up to 10,000 so that might account for the mismatch in numbers.
2. The moz results will be valid results for the latest scan, so if you are seeing errors in the moz reports they are current errors.
If you download the error report in csv, then select all your data and do the ctrl-windows-L command it will convert your data to filterable tables. You can then filter by dup title/dup content and the far left column will be the duped pages and the far right column where each page is linked from.3. I dont know anything about the specific CMS but all cms usually have the ability to spawn out duplicate links through various automatic mechanisms like links to print versions of pages and things like that. If this accounts for a chunk of your dup content then it should be a pretty easy dev fix to get rid of these systematic type errors in one go which should reduce the number of duplicate issues and let you focus more clearly on 'real' duplicate content issues.
Hope that helps!
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 Moz crawler not working
Hi Moz crawler keep failing on my site with the error showing : Our crawler was banned by a page on your site, either through your robots.txt, the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, or the meta robots tag. I'm not sure what am I missing out.. this is my robots.txt.. i don't think Im missing anything else.. https://www.wearefutureheads.com/robots.txt can the support team help ?
Moz Pro | | teikh0 -
How To Increase Blog DA to 50+
Hey, I am wondering to know the key metrics which MOZ considers before giving a blog of DA 50+. I have tried to search but couldn't find the best answers so was wondering how it's achieved. For example a site named "TheMastersGolftv.com" have a DA of 1 but i see they have links from many sites. I have checked other sites as well for example and they have less RDs but still had higher DA. Can anyone help me to explain Moz DA 2.0 factors a bit more. Thanks
Moz Pro | | jsoih760 -
My home page has an "A" rank in Moz and not ranking in Google.
My home page recently dropped from page one in Google to not being ranked for my top keyword. The page has an "A" ranking in MOZ for the keyword. Is there a way to find out the cause. I did have what looked like a duplicate page for a while 3 months ago when a domain was forwarding to my home page incorrectly. Appeared with second domain name instead of primary. Our business has been 95% through internet leads so quite an issue. Is there anyway to find out what is going on.
Moz Pro | | FredRoven0 -
How do retrieve historical traffic data in Moz?
I need to find traffic data from the start of my campaign in Moz, how do I do that? thanks!
Moz Pro | | ChristieC0 -
What is the Best Local Ranking Tool?
I'm trying to track down a tool that will provide localized rankings within Google Maps/Places, Yahoo Local, Bing Local as well as major local directories such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, etc. Additionally, I'm looking for the results to provide the address being displayed in the ranking. Any suggestions?
Moz Pro | | JonClark150 -
Keyword Difficulty Tool Ranking
I'm using the keyword difficultly tool to help me create a a list of 5 keywords (out of approx 50-60) to optimise pages for on a site. However I don't want to just choose the top 5 if 3 of them are too competitive and not worth targeting. From anyone's experience, for a small, new web company who has no pages optimised at this point, do you think there is a keyword difficulty score that I should create a hard limit on? So for instance, with a group of keywords, to only target keywords that have a difficulty score of 60 or below because anything higher would be too difficult to optimise the pages for in this stage of the sites development. Thanks in advance for your help Michelle 🙂
Moz Pro | | artlivemedia0 -
Old data in OSE?
Hello, I know the Mozscape was recently updated, but it's been a week and my site data ( DA, number of backlinks) in Open Site Explorer is still the same. The seomoz toolbar and my pro tools show my DA has increased ( I don't know of another way to verify my backlink count, so I'm not sure on that front). Any idea of the reason behind the disparity? Thanks.
Moz Pro | | richje0 -
Why are we not ranking? We have done all we can think of. Can you help?
We have an old domain that we have had for years now. And recently. December, we completely redesigned the site, I mean a complete overhaul, design, architecture, asp to php for example. Resubmitted to google via webmaster with a new site map etc. Our website for reference is www.completeoffice.co.uk. We are trying to rank in UK google, www.google.co.uk, for the term office refurbishment kent (we are on page 2) and office refurbishment (we are on page 17). This is confusing me, because thats 7 pages lower than we were originally, before the site design, its better seo wise, duplicate content is none, title tage meta tags all correct, domain authority has doubled from 12 to 24 in a few months all in an effort to rank better. our homepage and office refurb pages both got an A on the on page SEOmoz tool test. So we dont understand why we are not ranking highly. It seems sites, much uglier and less seo friendly than our with same or lower domain authority are ranking at least 10 pages higher than us. Why is this? Can anyone help or give us a few suggestions. All help greatly appreciated. SEOmozzers.
Moz Pro | | CompleteOffice0