Www vs non www - Crawl Error 902
-
I have just taken over admin of my company website and I have been confronted with crawl error 902 on the existing campaign that has been running for years in Moz. This seems like an intermittent problem. I have searched and tried to go over many of the other solutions and non of them seem to help.
The campaign is currently set-up with the url http://companywebsite.co.uk when I tried to do a Moz manual crawl using this URL I got an error message. I changed the link to crawl to http://www.companywebsite.co.uk and the crawl went off without a hitch and im currently waiting on the results. From testing I now know that if i go to the non-www version of my companies website then nothing happens it never loads. But if I go to the www version then it loads right away.
I know for SEO you only want 1 of these URLS so you dont have duplicate content. But i thought the non-www should redirect to the www version. Not just be completely missing.
I tried to set-up a new campaign with the defaults URL being the www version but Moz automatically changed it to the non-www version. It seems a cannot set up a new campaign with it automatically crawling the www version.
Does it sound like im out the right path to finding this cause? Or can somebody else offer up a solution?
Many thanks,
Ben.
-
Glad to hear thats all fixed! Though i will say thats a very slow response time for any development / hosting company typically i would expect a maximum response time of 8 hours.. We try to keep it under 2 heh.
But yes, glad thats working for you now
-
The problem was as you anticipated, after spending a few days chasing the party who actually look after it im pleased to say i checked this morning and all is working as expected.
Thanks very much for your help Toby!
-
Thanks Toby, Ive emailed off, I expect a reply to be a couple of days away (what it normally take them) Thanks for the help thus far and ill message back when they do!
-
In that case that would probably be the best place to start. If you want any evidence for a missing A record, heres a DNS checking tool (it currently throws an error because it can't find an A record).
Let me know what they say
-
I dont have access to the DNS, my access is limited to the Magento CMS, and ftp access to the root folder.
I guess its a case of popping an email off to the guys who built the site and control the web space and getting them to address the issue?
-
Ok, so the file is working, thats a good start!
Looks like we need to go back a step in the request process then. Do you have access to the DNS settings for the http://atp-instrumentation.co.uk domain? If so, please could you check if there is an A record set for it? (looks to be registered through Civica UK Ltd - Whois Report)
What i suspect might be the case is that you're missing an A record for atp-instrumentation.co.uk but that there is one set for the www.atp-instrumentation.co.uk.
I've run a couple of tests against the domain DNS and i get nothing back for the non-www address, which is what suggests that we're not even making it as far as your servers.
To set the A record, you'll be looking for something in your control panel for 'DNS settings' or maybe 'Host Records', you should see in there ether an option to select A record settings, or perhaps a dropdown with things like A, AAA, CNAME etc. You need to:
- select 'A'
- In the domain box type: atp-instrumentation.co.uk
- In the IP box, type: 82.118.110.42
Hopefully that makes sense. If your at all unsure, let me know and i'll do what i can to help more specifically. Domain control panels are so different for each provider its difficult to provide direct instructions without knowing what your panel looks like
-
I added the line and it did indeed break the website, got internal service error etc
So it seems the file is working
-
Just a note here, the Redirects do seem to be working, so it looks like the .htaccess file IS being loaded.
Please check anyway, its possible that the redirects are comming from another location if they have been set elseware as well. From a (very quick) look, the file seems to be formatted correctly so no obvious reason for the www redirects to not be working...
-
Hmm ok,
before i do anything else, we need to make sure that the .htaccess file is actually being loaded. To do that, we need to break it for a second.
at the top of the htaccess file, put something like (specifics dont matter here)
THISisInValid666
What we're trying to do is put some invalid text into the htaccess file so that the site breaks when it loads. The idea being that we can confirm that the .htaccess file is actually being used. So if you put that in and the site throws a 500 error (when navigating to it with or without www) we can confirm that changes we make should work.
If the site continues to load without issue then we know that the .htaccess file isnt in use so we need to look at server configureation directly (specifically the AllowOverrides settings)
Once you have confirmed if it does / doesnt break, remove the line again
-
Thanks Toby, here is the entire HTACCESS file with your fix implemented. Doesn't seem to have worked if i go to
http://atp-instrumentation.co.uk with no www it still fails to load
Edited out to shorten convo
-
You're correct, you can make it a little more generic though, without seeing all of your .htaccess file, try this:
Replace:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^companyname.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.companyname.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]With:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http%{ENV:protossl}://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]This is what could be called a wildcard redirect in that a direct copy paste should work for you with no need to edit. (you dont have to manually add in the correct domain name)
What it does:
- First it checks to see if the requested url has a www in it
- if it does -not- it then runs the rule, otherwise it ignores it.
- The rule first checks for http or https. Then adds in the www. followed by the domain and tld, finally adding the URI (/somepage/page for example).
- the L in square brakets means do not process anything else in the htaccess file
- the R=301 means that it will be a 301 (perminant) redirect.
If that still doesnt work for you, paste up your full .htaccess file, or you can send it to me directly if you'd rather and i'll take another look
-
Thanks Highland,
How do I go about changing this? I believe its to do with the .htacess file.
The website was developed in Magento via an external company who monitor it. Looking in the root folder I can see the htaccess file but it contains a lot lines of code and rewrites that I dont fully understand.
These lines are the one I think could be relevant so far.
############################################
enable rewrites
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^companyname.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.companyname.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]Then there is lots of category pages etc that are 301 redirected
Follow by
RewriteRule ^home http://www.companyname.co.uk/ [R=301,L]Then some more redirects for pages
I know this is specific but is this editable a different way in Magento? Thanks for any help offered i know this is getting more technical
-
You're 100% right. You should have one 301 redirect to the other. While there are some SEO reasons for this (mainly with duplicate content), the best reason is that it's just less confusing to end users to only have one URL to use. If your non-www has trouble loading I would say you need a 301 to the www version.
Moz restricts Top Level Domain (i.e. domain.com) and crawls accordingly. I have some set up with www.domain.com and some with just domain.com. The 301 to the www forces the issue but Moz is smart enough to crawl the proper pages.
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
-
Personalized Content Vs. Cloaking
Hi Moz Community, I have a question about personalization of content, can we serve personalized content without being penalized for serving different content to robots vs. users? If content starts in the same initial state for all users, including crawlers, is it safe to assume there should be no impact on SEO because personalization will not happen for anyone until there is some interaction? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Schema Markup Errors - Priority or Not?
Greetings All... I've been digging through the search console on a few of my sites and I've been noticing quite a few structured data errors. Most of the errors are related to: hcard, hentry and hatom. Most of them are missing author & entry-title, while the other one is missing: fn. I recently saw an article on SEL about Google's focus on spammy mark-up. The sites I use are built and managed by vendors, so I would have to impress upon them the impact of these errors and have them prioritize, then fix them. My question is whether or not this should be prioritized? Should I have them correct these errors sooner than later or can I take a phased approach? I haven't noticed any loss in traffic or anything like that, I'm more focused on what negative impact a "phased approach" could have. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | AfroSEO0 -
Google Webmaster Structured Data Error
In google webmaster tool in Structured data it is showing me 396 items with errors i.e. Data Type - Product, Source - Markup:schema.org, Pages -351, Items -351, Items with Errors - 351 When i click on the 351 in that it is showing Missing:Price but when i click on that product i can see the price 2) Data Type - searchresultspage, Source - Markup:schema.org, Pages- 47, Items - 47 Items with errors -45 When i click on the 47 in that it is showing Missing:Price but when i click on that product i can see the price So i am not getting what is the actual error?
Technical SEO | | jackinmathis10 -
Wordpress vs. home grown directory
I just moved my blog from a wordpress hosted solution to my owner server and am really hopeful that all the SEO ready wordpress pages plus I downloaded Yoast SEO will move my site. I started with 9000 pages being moz indexed with tons of errors eyerywhere, I have almost fixed everything getting ready to do a google index. One question. I have a directory of businesses and events for my local mountain community that is home grown with about 200 pages. see here: http://www.destinationbigbear.com/directory/bigbeardirectory.aspx which has a PA of 21 which is the same as my DA 21 (I know terrible)... Should I migrate these 200 pages with images to wordpress to take advantage of all the nice SEO possibilities? I have staff and it would probably take about $600 bucks to do it. I would only have to put about ten 301's such as http://www.destinationbigbear.com/directory/contentcat.aspx?ParentID=7 would be http://www.destinationbigbear.com/big-bear-restaurants/ Thank you again to all, I am hopeful I can answer some questions in the future for people... I am learning alot! Nick
Technical SEO | | nickcargill0 -
Strange Webmaster Tools Crawl Report
Up until recently I had robots.txt blocking the indexing of my pdf files which are all manuals for products we sell. I changed this last week to allow indexing of those files and now my webmaster tools crawl report is listing all my pdfs as not founds. What is really strange is that Webmaster Tools is listing an incorrect link structure: "domain.com/file.pdf" instead of "domain.com/manuals/file.pdf" Why is google indexing these particular pages incorrectly? My robots.txt has nothing else in it besides a disallow for an entirely different folder on my server and my htaccess is not redirecting anything in regards to my manuals folder either. Even in the case of outside links present in the crawl report supposedly linking to this 404 file when I visit these 3rd party pages they have the correct link structure. Hope someone can help because right now my not founds are up in the 500s and that can't be good 🙂 Thanks is advance!
Technical SEO | | Virage0 -
URL Error "NODE"
Hey guys, So I crawled my site after fixing a few issues, but for some reason I'm getting this strange node error that goes www.url.com/node/35801 which I haven't seen before. It appears to originate from user submitted content and when I go to the page it's a YouTube video with no video playing just a black blank screen. Has anyone had this issue before. I think it can probably just be taken off the site, but if it's a programming error of some sort I'd just like to know what it is to avoid it in the future. Thanks
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker0 -
HTACCESS redirect vs. forwarding
I'm having trouble using htaccess redirect to redirect a subdomain to a new domain on a different server. Tech support at godaddy suggested I forward the subdomain. The subdomain has already been cached by google. Will forwarding in this way have the same affect (SEO wise) as an htaccess redirect??
Technical SEO | | triple90