SEO News

Posted by Dr-Pete

First, the good news — as of today, all Moz Pro customer have access to the new version of Site Crawl, our entirely rebuilt deep site crawler and technical SEO auditing platform. The bad news? There isn’t any. It’s bigger, better, faster, and you won’t pay an extra dime for it.

A moment of humility, though — if you’ve used our existing site crawl, you know it hasn’t always lived up to your expectations. Truth is, it hasn’t lived up to ours, either. Over a year ago, we set out to rebuild the back end crawler, but we realized quickly that what we wanted was an entirely re-imagined crawler, front and back, with the best features we could offer. Today, we launch the first version of that new crawler.

Code name: Aardwolf

The back end is entirely new. Our completely rebuilt “Aardwolf” engine crawls twice as fast, while digging much deeper. For larger accounts, it can support up to ten parallel crawlers, for actual speeds of up to 20X the old crawler. Aardwolf also fully supports SNI sites (including Cloudflare), correcting a major shortcoming of our old crawler.

View/search *all* URLs

One major limitation of our old crawler is that you could only see pages with known issues. Click on “All Crawled Pages” in the new crawler, and you’ll be brought to a list of every URL we crawled on your site during the last crawl cycle:

You can sort this list by status code, total issues, Page Authority (PA), or crawl depth. You can also filter by URL, status codes, or whether or not the page has known issues. For example, let’s say I just wanted to see all of the pages crawled for Moz.com in the “/blog” directory…

I just click the [+], select “URL,” enter “/blog,” and I’m on my way.

Do you prefer to slice and dice the data on your own? You can export your entire crawl to CSV, with additional data including per-page fetch times and redirect targets.

Recrawl your site immediately

Sometimes, you just can’t wait a week for a new crawl. Maybe you relaunched your site or made major changes, and you have to know quickly if those changes are working. No problem, just click “Recrawl my site” from the top of any page in the Site Crawl section, and you’ll be on your way…

Starting at our Medium tier, you’ll get 10 recrawls per month, in addition to your automatic weekly crawls. When the stakes are high or you’re under tight deadlines for client reviews, we understand that waiting just isn’t an option. Recrawl allows you to verify that your fixes were successful and refresh your crawl report.

Ignore individual issues

As many customers have reminded us over the years, technical SEO is not a one-sized-fits-all task, and what’s critical for one site is barely a nuisance for another. For example, let’s say I don’t care about a handful of overly dynamic URLs (for many sites, it’s a minor issue). With the new Site Crawl, I can just select those issues and then “Ignore” them (see the green arrow for location):

If you make a mistake, no worries — you can manage and restore ignored issues. We’ll also keep tracking any new issues that pop up over time. Just because you don’t care about something today doesn’t mean you won’t need to know about it a month from now.

Fix duplicate content

Under “Content Issues,” we’ve launched an entirely new duplicate content detection engine and a better, cleaner UI for navigating that content. Duplicate content is now automatically clustered, and we do our best to consistently detect the “parent” page. Here’s a sample from Moz.com:

You can view duplicates by the total number of affected pages, PA, and crawl depth, and you can filter by URL. Click on the arrow (far-right column) for all of the pages in the cluster (shown in the screenshot). Click anywhere in the current table row to get a full profile, including the source page we found that link on.

Prioritize quickly & tactically

Prioritizing technical SEO problems requires deep knowledge of a site. In the past, in the interest of simplicity, I fear that we’ve misled some of you. We attempted to give every issue a set priority (high, medium, or low), when the difficult reality is that what’s a major problem on one site may be deliberate and useful on another.

With the new Site Crawl, we decided to categorize crawl issues tactically, using five buckets:

• Critical Crawler Issues
• Crawler Warnings
• Redirect Issues
• Metadata Issues
• Content Issues

Hopefully, you can already guess what some of these contain. Critical Crawler Issues still reflect issues that matter first to most sites, such as 5XX errors and redirects to 404s. Crawler Warnings represent issues that might be very important for some sites, but require more context, such as meta NOINDEX.

Prioritization often depends on scope, too. All else being equal, one 500 error may be more important than one duplicate page, but 10,000 duplicate pages is a different matter. Go to the bottom of the Site Crawl Overview Page, and we’ve attempted to balance priority and scope to target your top three issues to fix:

Moving forward, we’re going to be launching more intelligent prioritization, including grouping issues by folder and adding data visualization of your known issues. Prioritization is a difficult task and one we haven’t helped you do as well as we could. We’re going to do our best to change that.

Dive in & tell us what you think!

All existing customers should have access to the new Site Crawl as of earlier this morning. Even better, we’ve been crawling existing campaigns with the Aardwolf engine for a couple of weeks, so you’ll have history available from day one! Stay turned for a blog post tomorrow on effectively prioritizing Site Crawl issues, and a webinar on Friday at 9am Pacific.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Danielle_Launders

That’s right! We’re bringing back our MozCon contest where you, our community, can submit your creative entries for a chance to come to MozCon 2017 for free! Last year we had so many impressive and deserving entries, it was hard to choose just one… which is why this year there will be three lucky winners. Yes! You read correctly — three lucky people will be able to attend MozCon for free. Moz will not only cover your registration, but you’ll also have reserved VIP front-row seating, and we’ll pick up the bill for accommodations at the Grand Hyatt.

This is your chance to meet Roger, laugh and cry at MozCon Ignite, converse with speakers during lunch, and of course learn all the things! To enter, just send over a unique piece of content telling us why we should send you to MozCon. Make sure your entry is both original and creative!

First up: Create!

Brainstorm and create something new, unique, and compelling. Last year we saw tons of ingenious ideas, including:

• Videos (must be one minute or less)
• Blog posts
• Songs
• Books
• Drawings
• Slide decks
• Anything else you can dream up!

These are just a few examples; there’s plenty of room for you to come up with your own trail-blazing ideas. Perhaps you’ll film your own Whiteboard Friday detailing why you should come, or record a custom-written, sung-from-the-heart tune about why you love MozCon? Get creative and show us what you got!

Secondly: Submit

Once your content has been perfected and is ready to share, tweet us a link @Moz and use the hashtag #mozcon by Sunday, June 18 at 5:00pm PDT. To keep things fair, there will be no exceptions — so make sure to follow instructions and don’t forget to include your contact information (name and email address) somewhere easily visible within your content. We need to be able to connect with you if you’re a winner!

All submissions will be reviewed and voted on by Moz staff. We’ll let the votes of 150 Mozzers decide the top 3 entries.

Let’s break it down:

• Submissions close on Sunday, June 18 at 5:00pm PDT
• Entries will be judged by Mozzers based on creativity and uniqueness of content
• Winners will be announced and the winning entry shared from @Moz via Twitter on Monday, June 26
• You must be able to attend MozCon, July 17–19 2017, in Seattle. Prizes are non-transferrable.
• All submissions must adhere to the MozCon Code of Conduct
• Contest is void where prohibited by law.
• The value of the prize will be reported for tax purposes as required by law; the winner will receive an IRS form 1099 at the end of the calendar year and a copy of such form will be filed with the IRS. The winner is solely responsible for reporting and paying any and all applicable taxes related to the prizes and paying any expenses associated with any prize which are not specifically provided for in the official rules.

What 3 lucky people win:

• A free ticket to MozCon 2017, including optional VIP front-row seating (valued at $1049)
• Accommodations with suite upgrade at the Grand Hyatt from July 16–20, 2017 (valued at $1,300+)

All right, what are you waiting for? Time to start on those submissions. Best of luck to you all!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!