How bad is this?

[TonyG]

This website is a directory in the mental health space and has 34k pages (keep in mind most of those pages are directory listings). I finally got access to our Google Webmaster Tools account today. I fired our previous SEO guy a few months ago and was working on other projects, so I hadn't even looked at Tools. Part of my job description for the company i work at was to monetize this site more and eventually sell it for 7+ figures. Now my job is basically Project Managing the whole thing from monetization to content to SEO. I am not strong at SEO, thus why I'm posting here

How bad are these stats and what is my best course of action?

Crawl Errors

http =2
in Sitemaps = 6
not found = 19
restricted by robots.txt = 659
Unreachable = 78 (most of these are due to moving the site from dot net to php two years ago)

A sitemap has NOT been submitted to G Tools

Duplicate Meta Descriptions = 575
Duplicate Title Tags = 2300

How bad are these stats and what is my best course of action?

Many thanks. I am about to have an anxiety attack.

[ak]

Hey Tony all of that can be fixed quite quickly

[CK]

Duplicate Meta Descriptions = 575
Duplicate Title Tags = 2300


^ this makes me want to throw up assuming it's correct.


It will def take time to change each and every one of them. I would go through the urls that its reporting as bad and make sure that there really are pages missing and redirect them if neccessary or get them back up if you removed them. And fix the duplicate title tags and descriptions. I hate WT - I find more errors with it's reporting then with the site it's saying there are errors on.

[TonyG]

I would go through the urls that its reporting as bad and make sure that there really are pages missing and redirect them if neccessary or get them back up if you removed them.

all of the "unreachable" url's look like this:

/directory/alaska..
/directory/texas..
etc

All of the bad url's end with ".."

I believe the ".." comes from the old dot net platform the site was on. We moved to php 1.5 years ago. It's hard to redirect those pages because we can't see what the rest of the URL is. Our directory pages look like /directory/state/city/profession. In the case of the URL's above, they all cut off at the state level. So it's tough to tell which page on the directory they are suppose to go to (could be one of many cities or professions).

[OnlinePokerReport]

Responses inline


Crawl Errors

http =2
What are they?

in Sitemaps = 6
Unsure how you have sitemap crawl errors if G doesn't have a sitemap for site, but also not a big deal. These are usually URLS you have blocked Google from by robots that still appear in sitemap.

not found = 19
301 Redirect these

restricted by robots.txt = 659
What is robots blocking and why? If it's meant to be blocked, no problem; afaik you can block as much as you want with robots wo/o Google taking issue. If it's not meant to be blocked, edit robots.txt

Unreachable = 78 (most of these are due to moving the site from dot net to php two years ago)
Unreachable usually means site was down or there was a DNS error. Some reasons you might be getting these / ways to fix here: Network unreachable - can't explain why. - Webmaster Central Help

A sitemap has NOT been submitted to G Tools
Then submit one

Duplicate Meta Descriptions = 575
Duplicate Title Tags = 2300
Are these duplicate pages or no? If they are, choose one and redirect the others. If they are not, time to really eff over the intern - these will have to be generated manually.

How bad are these stats and what is my best course of action?
They're fine except for the dupe stuff.

Many thanks. I am about to have an anxiety attack.
I wouldn't unless you don't have an intern.

[OnlinePokerReport]

all of the "unreachable" url's look like this:

/directory/alaska..
/directory/texas..
etc

All of the bad url's end with ".."

I believe the ".." comes from the old dot net platform the site was on. We moved to php 1.5 years ago. It's hard to redirect those pages because we can't see what the rest of the URL is. Our directory pages look like /directory/state/city/profession. In the case of the URL's above, they all cut off at the state level. So it's tough to tell which page on the directory they are suppose to go to (could be one of many cities or professions).

You should be able to create a rewrite rule that strips those out and redirects to the clean URL. PM me and I'm pretty sure can get you the correct expression.

[TonyG]

Crawl Errors

http =2
What are they?

They are two pages that end in funky gibberish like this "%0D%0As-anonymous-aa.aspx"

in Sitemaps = 6
Unsure how you have sitemap crawl errors if G doesn't have a sitemap for site, but also not a big deal. These are usually URLS you have blocked Google from by robots that still appear in sitemap.

Oversight on my end. There is a sitemap.

restricted by robots.txt = 659
What is robots blocking and why? If it's meant to be blocked, no problem; afaik you can block as much as you want with robots wo/o Google taking issue. If it's not meant to be blocked, edit robots.txt[/B]

It appears they were meant to be blocked. All of the restricted pages have "?id=" at the end and I think are a result of moving the site to a new platform. Not sure why there are 600+ restricted pages though....

Unreachable = 78 (most of these are due to moving the site from dot net to php two years ago)
Unreachable usually means site was down or there was a DNS error. Some reasons you might be getting these / ways to fix here: Network unreachable - can't explain why. - Webmaster Central Help

On a scale of 1-10 (10 being really bad), how bad is having unreachable pages like this for our serp rankings?

Duplicate Meta Descriptions = 575
Duplicate Title Tags = 2300
Are these duplicate pages or no? If they are, choose one and redirect the others. If they are not, time to really eff over the intern - these will have to be generated manually.

They are not duplicate pages. We have a directory where people can upload a profile of their business. So unique title/meta data hasn't been added for each page. If any, what kind of negative affect is this having on our seo?

Thanks!

[Ridge]

I'm going to guess this is now on a CMS of some kind? If so, if it's a decent CMS there is probably an export feature - Long term it's probably worth looking for a cleaner more stable solution - Just because a CMS is easy to use and helps throw up lots of content, many of the most common ones are filled with code bloat, and have some nearly un-fixable SEO issues.

Edit - Oh and almost all CMS's have a bad habit of inserting something like <sitename> in the page Title, and have auto generating or auto copying meta data features. So I'm going to bet of you looked at the global backend template settings, you can amend that li9ne of code and fix a lot of your issues instantly.

Of course I'm just taking some guesses, but there is a common issues with older websites running a CMS, custom CMS, or an older .net database driven websites. Especially if a lot of stuff was duplicated and auto-generated.

[Catfish]

all of the "unreachable" url's look like this:

/directory/alaska..
/directory/texas..
etc

If you do not need any of those directories, you could use use the removal tool in WT (CrawlerAccess/URL Removal) and remove the directories as a whole. On the other hand, there may be some links out there pointing to articles in those directories. Then you'd be better off to make a global redirect for all URLs inside those directories to your main page.
For most CMS systems, there a tools/extensions that can you can use to set up redirects with inside the CMS, without having to use the .htaccess. Example: : ReDJ for Joomla