Thousands of crawl errors on SEOMoz

[Jan]

We use SEOmoz and the crawl report came back with tens of thousands of errors (duplicate content, missing meta tags, 404 errors, duplicate page titles). I found some threads regarding this issue from 2013, but I’m hoping there might be some updated info and/or fixes. Please advise.

[Barry]

Hi Jan,

Can you highlight some examples of the most common errors you are seeing?

[Jan]

Sorry, I’m not quite sure what info you are looking for. We have the following amount of errors all stemming from the calendar. I have also included a link to one of the error pages. Please let me know if you need additional information.

3352–duplicate content (http://lightsong.net/calendar/category/lightsong/2014-07-21/)
8707–missing meta tags (http://lightsong.net/calendar/category/lightsong/2015-06-25/)
834–404 errors (http://lightsong.net/calendar/2011-08-21)
3764–duplicate page titles (http://lightsong.net/calendar/category/reiki/2015-07-24/)

Thank you for your help.

[Barry]

Hi Jan,

So let’s start by looking at a couple of those issues.

3352–duplicate content (http://lightsong.net/calendar/category/lightsong/2014-07-21/)

So if you look at any event view for which there are no events it is naturally going to have much the same content as any other empty view for a similar timespan – ie, day view for one empty date will be near identical to day view for a different empty date.

By default, though, we set something called the robots tag to a value of “noindex,follow”: this indicates to search engines that they should not index these empty views, but that they are welcome to follow any links they find there.

On your site, at least for the empty day view you linked to, that robots tag isn’t present.

834–404 errors (http://lightsong.net/calendar/2011-08-21)

So this is another day view for which there are no events.

It does indeed return a 404 status and this is intentional: following from the first issue (duplicate content) the problem with returning a 200 OK status instead, for instance, is that some search engines may realize that these ought to be returning 404s.

In such a case it may treat pages like this as “soft 404s” which can incur a higher “penalty” than pages that return a true 404.

Remember, on some occasions a 404 is the most appropriate status to return.

theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/404_and_seo

In summary, for 404 and duplicate content issues we definitely welcome your thoughts on how the plugin should behave – but the answer is not necessarily as straightforward as you might think and we do have various measures in place to help things along – though some, such as the robots tag, is missing (possibly due to a theme conflict) in your case.

Would you like us to help you troubleshoot that specific part of the problem?

[Susan]

We are having a similar problem, particularly with “duplicate content” errors. Investigating whether the <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” /> tag was in the header, I found that, if I get to a page with no events by
1. searching for a word in the tribe bar in week or month view, or
2. using the previous / next day links in day view
the meta robots tag is in the header.
However, if I get to a day with no events by selecting a date from the datepicker in the tribe bar, the meta robots tag is not in the page header! When I went back and looked at the flagged event urls in both the duplicated content and 4XX error reports, they all end in a date – most are /events/date or events/category/name-of-category/date.
It looks lik something date related is not generating the meta tag. How do I fix this?

[Barry]

Hi Susan,

That’s an interesting observation, I wasn’t aware of that.

We do have a policy of sticking to one customer and one problem per support topic, though, so could I ask you to post your question in a new topic of your own?

If you could also include a few URLs demonstrating the problem that would be fantastic.

Thanks!

[Barry]

Hi!

It’s been a while so I’m going to go ahead and close this topic.

• Need help with anything else? Go right ahead and post a new topic, one of the team will be only too happy to help
• Still need help with this issue and need to re-open it? Again, please simply create a new topic and link to this one to provide the team with some context

Thanks!

[Author]

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