GWT False Reporting or GoogleBot has weird crawling ability?
-
Hi I hope someone can help me.
I have launched a new website and trying hard to make everything perfect. I have been using Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) to ensure everything is as it should be but the crawl errors being reported do not match my site. I mark them as fixed and then check again the next day and it reports the same or similar errors again the next day.
Example:
http://www.mydomain.com/category/article/ (this would be a correct structure for the site).
GWT reports:
http://www.mydomain.com/category/article/category/article/ 404 (It does not exist, never has and never will) I have been to the pages listed to be linking to this page and it does not have the links in this manner. I have checked the page source code and all links from the given pages are correct structure and it is impossible to replicate this type of crawl.
This happens accross most of the site, I have a few hundred pages all ending in a trailing slash and most pages of the site are reported in this manner making it look like I have close to 1000, 404 errors when I am not able to replicate this crawl using many different methods.
The site is using a htacess file with redirects and a rewrite condition.
Rewrite Condition:
Need to redirect when no trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !.(html|shtml)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ /$1/ [L,R=301]The above condition forces the trailing slash on folders.
Then we are using redirects in this manner:
Redirect 301 /article.html http://www.domain.com/article/
In addition to the above we had a development site whilst I was building the new site which was http://dev.slimandsave.co.uk now this had been spidered without my knowledge until it was too late. So when I put the site live I left the development domain in place (http://dev.domain.com) and redirected it like so:
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^ - [E=protossl]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteRule ^ - [E=protossl:s]RewriteRule ^ http%{ENV:protossl}://www.domain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]</ifmodule>
Is there anything that I have done that would cause this type of redirect 'loop' ?
Any help greatly appreciated.\
-
Yeah - do this!
-
Anyone any thoughts on this?
-
Sorry I also should add that the url structure that google generates is like this:
http://www.domain.com/category/article/
http://www.domain.com/category/article/same-category/differentarticle/
http://www.domain.com/category/article/same-category/another-different-article/
http://www.domain.com/category/article/another-different-category/differentarticle/
etc, it is like it gets to a category article and then moves sideways and somehow adds the move onto the current url without keeping hold of the suffix of the URL
-
Doesn't sound like GWT is false reporting. May want to check your trailing slash URL rewrite. It seems like there is an issue there as what you are describing sounds like the URLs are being written incorrectly and causing the incorrect URLs to be generated and show up in GWT.
Your 301 looks ok and if the dev site was spidered and indexed, you should just add the site to GWT and then use the URL removal tool to remove the site from the index, then remove the site and redirect.
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
-
Googlebots and cache
Our site checks whether visitors are resident in the same country or live abroad. If it recognises that the visitor comes from abroad, the content is made more appropriate for them. Basically, instead of encouraging the visitor to come and visit a showroom, it tells them that we export worldwide. It does this by IP checking. So far so good! But I noticed that if I look at cached pages in Google's results, that the cached pages are all export pages. I've also used Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console) and rendered pages as Google - and they also render export pages. Does anybody have a solution to this?
Technical SEO | | pulcinella2uk
Is it a problem?
Can Google see the properly (local - as in UK) version of the site?0 -
Strange Crawl Report
Hey Moz Squad, So I have kind of strange case. My website locksmithplusinc.com has been around for a couple years. I have had all sorts of pages and blogs that have maybe ranked for a certain location a longtime ago and got deleted so I could speed up the site and consolidate my efforts. I said that because I think that might be part of the problem. When I was crawl reporting my site just three weeks ago on moz I had over 23 crawl report issues. Duplicate pages, missing meta tags the regular stuff. But now all of a sudden when I crawl report on MOZ it comes up with Zero issues. So I did another crawl On google analytic and this is what came up. SO im very confused because none of these url's are even url's on my site. So maybe people are searching for this stuff and clicking on broken links that are still indexed and getting this 404 error? What do you guys think? Thank you guys so much for taking a shot at this one. siS44ug
Technical SEO | | Meier0 -
Absurdly High Crawl Stats
Over the past month and a half, our crawl stats have been rising violently. A few weeks ago, our crawl stats rose, such that the pages crawled per day worked out to the entire site being crawled 6 times a day, with a corresponding rise in KB downloaded per day. Last week, the crawl rate jumped again, such that the site is being crawled roughly 30x a day. I'm not seeing any chatter at there about an algorithm change, and I've checked and double-checked the site for signs of duplicate content, changes in our backlink profile, or anything else. We haven't seen appreciable changes in our search volume, either impressions or clicks. Any ideas what could be going on?
Technical SEO | | Tyler-Brown0 -
Massive Increase in 404 Errors in GWT
Last June, we transitioned our site to the Magento platform. When we did so, we naturally got an increase in 404 errors for URLs that were not redirected (for a variety of reasons: we hadn't carried the product for years, Google no longer got the same string when it did a "search" on the site, etc.). We knew these would be there and were completely fine with them. We also got many 404s due to the way Magento had implemented their site map (putting in products that were not visible to customers, including all the different file paths to get to a product even though we use a flat structure, etc.). These were frustrating but we did custom work on the site map and let Google resolve those many, many 440s on its own. Sure enough, a few months went by and GWT started to clear out the 404s. All the poor, nonexistent links from the site map and missing links from the old site - they started disappearing from the crawl notices and we slowly went from some 20k 404s to 4k 404s. Still a lot, but we were getting there. Then, in the last 2 weeks, all of those links started showing up again in GWT and reporting as 404s. Now we have 38k 404s (way more than ever reported). I confirmed that these bad links are not showing up in our site map or anything and I'm really not sure how Google found these again. I know, in general, these 404s don't hurt our site. But it just seems so odd. Is there any chance Google bots just randomly crawled a big ol' list of outdated links it hadn't tried for awhile? And does anyone have any advice for clearing them out?
Technical SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
Wordpress URL weirdness - why is google registering non-pretty URLS?
I've noticed in my stats that google is indexing some non-pretty URLs from my wordpress-based blog.
Technical SEO | | peterdbaron
For instance, this URL is appearing google search: http://www.admissionsquest.com/onboardingschools/index.php?p=439 It should be: http://www.admissionsquest.com/onboardingschools/2009/01/do-american-boarding-schools-face-growing-international-competition.html Last week I added the plugin Redirection in order to consolidate categories & tags. Any chance that this has something to do with it? Recs on how to solve this? Fyi - I've been using pretty URLS with wordpress from the very beginning and this is the first time that I've seen this issue. Thanks in advance for your help!0 -
Crawl diagnostic summary
In my crawl diagnostic summary its showing an error with duplicate page title and duplicate page content...why its been shown and how it can be rectified? I have pne page web site so i was unable to give options for sub domain name is it because of tht?I hope this error wont hamper my SEO process.
Technical SEO | | strasshgoa0 -
Google Webmaster Tools reports 404s for plain text. Should I create those URLs and 301 them to actual pages?
IA few years back I noticed that Google Webmaster Tools returns 404s from regular text containing a URL, but no anchor tag. I came accross this again today. Is it worthwhile to create those URLs and 301 redirect them to proper pages.
Technical SEO | | Svetoslav0 -
Crawling image folders / crawl allowance
We recently removed /img and /imgp from our robots.txt file thus allowing googlebot to crawl our image folders. Not sure why we had these blocked in the first place, but we opened them up in response to an email from Google Product Search about not being able to crawl images - which can/has hurt our traffic from Google Shopping. My question is: will allowing Google to crawl our image files eat up our 'crawl allowance'? We wouldn't want Google to not crawl/index certain pages, and ding our organic traffic, because more of our allotted crawl bandwidth is getting chewed up crawling image files. Outside of the non-detailed crawl stat graphs from Webmaster Tools, what's the best way to check how frequently/ deeply our site is getting crawled? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | evoNick0