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 How to concat moz.com
Hello,
Moz Pro | | GrzegorzZ
I wanted to contact moz.com. I started my 30 day trial to test service.
After 2-3 days totally forgot about it. I remembered about moz.com when i received invoice saying they're gonna charge me.
I immediately wrote email to them that I do not want this service. I forgot and only put credit card data because i was required to. And would like a refund since it was 2-3 hours after bill. Unfortunately sending messages via their contact form is not an option. There is no confirmation on my email they received message nor return message from them.0 -
Historical data in rank report not matching summary?
I got a new rank report today. For a lot of keywords in Yahoo and Bing it is saying things like >49 etc. When I hover over it, it tells me that these are new keywords for me that I didn't rank for before. When I look at the historical graph for those specific engines though it just shows me going back at the same position historically. For example like position 17 going back many months without change. Can anyone tell me what is up with that?
Moz Pro | | edu-SEO0 -
Strange nothing site ranking
Hi There. If you check who ranks for "credit cards" there is a website https://www.woolworthsmoney.com.au/ that is in position #5 This is a highly competitive keyword, but OpenSiteExporer.org cannot give me any backlinks for it. it says "No Data Available for this URL" The same thing happens in Market Samurai - no data 1. What are these guys doing that the others are not? 2. How come OSE can't pull any data for it?
Moz Pro | | SearchProduct0 -
Moz Trust
I saw a severe drop in MozTrust for multiple sites I am working on. We have added some links this month, but would be considered 'spammy' or to be low quality. No other links appear to have been lost / removed. If we had some very high quality links before and have added some mid-level links can this be what is causing the drop? From the description on SEOmoz, it seemed to me that trust could only go up as links were added. It appears that I am missing something.
Moz Pro | | DigitalDiameter0 -
Site Ranking Report
Hi guys, My site ranking report says that I've gone from being 1-20 for a variety of keywords in Google UK to not in the top 50. When I do a search myself I see that my site remains where it previously was (between 1-20). How reliable is the site ranking reporting on a weekly basis? Is it best to look at it monthly?
Moz Pro | | columbus0 -
Why have my rankings dropped on my keyword report but there is no change for the same keywords on google??
I received a keyword ranking report over the weekend, was horrified to see some of my keywords have dropped ranks by 20+ for some 😮 I checked them on google and they haven't moved (confused.com) Any information would be greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | Anthonykal-group0 -
SEOMoz Crawler and rel_canonical_tag Errors
This tag is showing up on category pages (that do not have a duplicate page on the site). In mid November Google cut our traffic by 30%. Could this tag be confusing the spider? According to the moz crawler - we seemed to be dinged for this on 95% of our pages. Is this hurting us? It seems to direct back to the same page.EG: From the FMI3600 Page http://www.brick-anew.com/FMI-3600-Fireplace-Doors.html: http://www.brick-anew.com/FMI-3600-Fireplace-Doors.html"> There is only one page for the FMI 3600 Fireplace Door category - however, it does have the same products on it as other FP Door Category pages,
Moz Pro | | SammyT0 -
When using Wordpress, why does it show up so many meta data errors on here and on google webmaster? A list of do's would be good?
Using wordpress is a good CMS, yet there sre so many meta data errors occuring, is there a list of what to look out for and good practices when using wordpress?
Moz Pro | | CosmikCarrot0