Why can no tool crawl this site?
-
I am trying to perform a crawl analysis on a client's website at https://www.bravosolution.com
I have tried to crawl it with IIS for SEO, Sreaming Frog and Xenu and not one of them makes it further than the home page of the site. There is nothing I can see in the robots.txt that is blocking these agents.
As far as I can see, Google is able to crawl the site although they have noticed a significant drop in organic traffic.
Any advise would be very welcome
Regards
Danny
-
I would look into finding a method to redirect via your server rather than with javascript. This will ensure that bots can properly crawl your site.
I would also add hreflang tags which should help Google with the multiple language versions of the site.
Also in the short term you may want to do something like add a link or a delayed meta refresh just in case someone either has javascript disabled or is using script blocking extensions. This will make sure they at least see something instead of a blank page.
-
Really helpful and much appreciated - many thanks!
Danny
-
Yes that's what I said CleverPhD, I just couldn't type that fast today.
Only joking Thanks for expanding on the subject.
-
To expand on Dean's point.
If you look at the source code on https://www.bravosolution.com/ you get a bunch of JavaScript (shown below). It is basically looking at the users location and the sending them to the appropriate version of your website based on country. This is why here in the US we are sent to https://www.bravosolution.com/cms/us
Many spiders/tools (and Googlebot was not really good at this until recently) are not good at (or do not do any) crawling and executing on JavaScript so they get stuck when they hit your home page.
If you want to evaluate any of your localized sites, just run those URLs through various tools like screaming frog etc. You would then ask, "Well, how do I know that my main https://www.bravosolution.com is working properly for SEO?". I don't have as much background in how to optimize for international SEO, but you can do a several things to start with.
-
Google anything having to do with Aleyda Solis and International SEO. She posts a lot of stuff here at Moz and is pretty sharp on this stuff. There may be a more appropriate way to redirect international clients from your main page that how you are executing.
-
Run your home page through Google Webmaster Tools under Crawl > Fetch as Google. See what the page looks like
-
Double check your robots.txt to make sure you are not blocking any folders that would contain a JavaScript library. Based on the code below, I do not see you referencing any external libraries, but if you are dependent on JS to send Google, it would be worth having your developer check things
-
As with everything on what to do, it all depends. If all of your local country sites are independently ranked and successful, this main website may nor may not be doing you any favors currently if it is just a pass through with no domain authority to start with. Spend time on step #1 to see if there is anything else worth doing.
Cheers!
name="description" />
-
-
Yes, it should redirect you to the correct country version based on your IP. But I still can't crawl the site from the home page
-
Cheers Bryan - much appreciated. It's driving me crazy!
-
Hi Danny,
Have you looked at the site via http://web-sniffer.net/
It would appear that the home page is just a JavaScript redirect.
I was redirected to https://www.bravosolution.com/cms/us which then could seen via Sreaming Frog.
The reason for my (default) redirect is given by web-sniffer as:
DEFAULT CORPORATE if ( path == '' ) { path = '/cms/us
-
Interesting. I verified the robots file and tried running through screaming frog... nothing. I' will dig into this with my dev team to try and get you an answer asap.
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
-
Site dropped from SERP
Hello, I've been ranking a site for the last 5 months with good success, ranking on the first page for a high traffic keyword. In the beginning of September however, my site completely dropped out of the SERPs for several of those keywords yet my site was still indexed and there was no penalty applied to my site via search console. I would assume this maybe because of the update during the time.My site came back again a week later and it was ranking much higher on the first page (#2). Today, I just checked the SERPs and my site is now gone again. It was there this morning but now as of two hours ago it is gone, as well as one of my main competitors. My site is still indexed and no penalties via search console. Does anyone know what causes these types of issues? Im assuming my site will come back in a week or so with hopefully the same or better ranking, but when I have disruptions like this it really hurts my organic traffic. Any input is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KathleenDC0 -
Changes to 'links to your site' in WebMaster Tools?
We're writing more out of curiosity... Clicking on "Download latest links" within 'Links to your site' in Google's WebMaster Tools would usually bring back links discovered recently. However, the last few times (for numerous accounts) it has brought back a lot of legacy links - some from 2011 - and includes nothing recent. We would usually expect to see a dozen at least each month. ...Has anyone else noticed this? Or, do you have any advice? Thanks in advance, Ant!
Technical SEO | | AbsoluteDesign0 -
Any ideas why this site is being penalized?
http://www.my-french-house.com/ has been online since around 2004 and has nearly always been in the top 10 serps for terms like 'property for sale in france'. However, over the last 12 months we've been hit really hard by Google and have fallen dramatically in rank. Can anyone give any insight into what may have happened? As an aside, we've had no message in the Google Webmaster Console and have not contacted Google about the apparent penalty / penalization. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Cheers Jim
Technical SEO | | jimpannell0 -
How can the search engines can crawl my java script generated web pages
For example when I click in a link of this movie from the home page, the link send me to this page http://www.vudu.mx/movies/#!content/293191/Madagascar-3-Los-Fugitivos-Madagascar-3-Europes-Most-Wanted-Doblada but in the source code I can't see the meta tittle and description and I think the search engines wont see that too, am I right? I guess that only appears the source code of that "master template" and that it is not usefull for me. So, my question is, how can I add dynamically this data to every page of each movie to allow crawl all the pages to the search engines? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | mobile3600 -
Recent Webmaster Tools Glitch Impacting Site Quality?
The ramifications of this would not be specific to myself but to anyone with this type of content on their pages... Maybe someone can chime in here, but I'm not sure how much if at all site errors (for example 404 errors) as reported by Google Webmaster Tools are seen as a factor in site quality, which would impact SEO rankings. Any insight on that alone would be appreciated. I've noticed some fairly new weird stuff going on in the WMT 404 error reports. It seems as though their engine is finding objects within the source code of the page that are NOT links but look a URL, then trying to crawl them and reporting them as broken. I've seen a couple different of cases in my environment that seem to trigger this issue. The easiest one to explain are Google Analytic virtual pageview Javascript calls where for example you might send a virtual pageview back to GA for clicks on outbound links. So in the source code of your page you would have something like: onclick="<a class="attribute-value">_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outboundclick/www.othersite.com']);</a> Although this is obviously not a crawl-able link, sure enough Webmaster Tools now would be reporting the following broken page with a 404: www.mysite.com/outboundclick/www.otherwite.com I've seen other such cases of thing that look like URLs but not actual links being pulled out of the page source and reported as broken links. Has anyone else noticed this? Do 404 instances (in this case false ones) reported by Webmaster Tools impact site quality rankings and SEO? Interesting issue here, I'm looking forward to hear some people's thoughts on this. Chris
Technical SEO | | cbubinas0 -
See your sites Architecture
Does anybody know a problem where you can see how your internal linkings look to the search engines?
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
How to setup tumblr blog.site.com to give juice to site.com
Is it possible to get a subdomain blog.site.com that is on tumblr to count toward site.com. I hoped I could point it in webmaster tools like we do www but alas no. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | oznappies0 -
Can search engines penalize my site if I block IPs from some countries?
I have spotted that some countries in South America generate lot's of traffic on my site and I don't want to sell my service there. Can I be penalized for blocking IPs from certain counties? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Xopie0