Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How reliable is the link depth info from Xenu?
-
Hi everyone!
I searched existing Q & A and couldn't find an answer to this question. Here is the scenario:
The site is: http://www.ccisolutions.com
I am seeing instances of category pages being identified as 8 levels deep. For example, this one:
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/B8I
This URL redirects to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/headphones - which Xenu identifies as being only 1 level deep.
Xenu does not seem to be recognizing that the first URL 301-redirects to the second. Is this normal for the way Xenu typically reports? If so, why is the first URL indicated to be so much further down in the structure? Is this an indication of site architecture problems? Or is it an indication of problems with how our 301-redirects are being handled? Both?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
-
Hi Mike,
Many thanks ro both you and Dr. Pete. I apologize for leaving both of your answers hanging here for so long. Both explanations made perfect sense and I totally get it now. Now it's just a matter of fixing some of those issues. I've know since coming on board here as an in-house SEO that we had some pretty significant site architecture problems. This is just another one to add to my "to-fix" list
Many thanks to you both I really appreciate your responses!Dana
-
Thanks so much Dr. Pete this is very helpful. My apologies to both you and Mike for taking so long to circle back and mark this as answered. You both have done an excellent job of explaining what I am seeing. It makes perfect sense, even though it does point to some site architecture/internal linking problems we need to fix. But that's exactly why I asked the question:-)
-
Hi Dana,
It looks like some of the *.cat links are still being used through your site.
For instance, /StoreFront/B8I.cat is actually 301-ing to /StoreFront/category/B8I.cat and /StoreFront/B8I.cat (with anchor text "headphones or earbuds") is being used on the /StoreFront/category/controlling-the-low-end-on-your-stage page.
The /StoreFront/category/controlling-the-low-end-on-your-stage page is at level 7 in your site and is linking to /StoreFront/B8I.cat, making it at level 8, which then 301s to /StoreFront/category/B8I.cat, keeping it still on level 8 because of the 301, and finally redirecting with a 301 to StoreFront/category/headphones (which is a level 1, because it is accessible from the homepage (level 0) navigation).
Does that make sense?
It did in my brain... just let me know if it does on paper : )
Hope this helps.
Mike
-
It's hard to be completely sure without digging into the crawl, but keep in mind that Xenu is crawl-based, to both things can be true. Somewhere, a link to that page is 8 levels deep, event if it 301-redirects to a page that is only 1 level deep. This could indicate a problem and/or a mismatch in your architecture. Ideally, if you're 301-redirecting the page, then there should be no internal links to the old URL. Mixed signals can make messes, so I'd try to pin down where this link is coming from. Xenu probably is seeing something real.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Is a page with links to all posts okay?
Hi folks. Instead of an archive page template in my theme (I have my reasons), I am thinking of simply typing the post title as and when I publish a post, and linking to the post from there. Any SEO issues that you can think of? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16165422281340 -
Link Brokers Yes or No?
We have a client who has asked us to talk to link brokers to speed up the back linking process. Although I've been aware of them for ages I have never openly discussed the possible use of 'buying' links or engaging in that part of the industry. Do they have a place in SEO and if so what is the MOZ communities thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Do I have to many internal links which is diluting link juice to less important pages
Hello Mozzers, I was looking at my homepage and subsequent category landing pages on my on my eCommerce site and wondered whether I have to many internal links which could in effect be diluting link juice to much of the pages I need it to flow. My homepage has 266 links of which 114 (43%) are duplicate links which seems a bit to much to me. One of my major competitors who is a national company has just launched a new site design and they are only showing popular categories on their home page although all categories are accessible from the menu navigation. They only have 123 links on their home page. I am wondering whether If I was to not show every category on my homepage as some of them we don't really have any sales from and only concerntrate on popular ones there like my competitors , then the link juice flowing downwards in the site would be concerntated as I would have less links for them to flow ?... Is that basically how it works ? Is there any negatives with regards to duplicate links on either home or category landing page. We are showing both the categories as visual boxes to select and they are also as selectable links on the left of a page ? Just wondered how duplicate links would be treated? Any thoughts greatly appreciated thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Wrong titles in site links
Hello fellow marketers, I have found this weird thing with our website in the organic results. The sitelinks in the SERP shows wrong written text. As in grammatically incorrect text. My question is where does Google get the text from? It is not the page title as we can see it. kKsFv0X.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | auke18101 -
Does Link Detox Boost Work?
That is a question I am sure many of your have been asking since they launched the product several weeks ago. Cemper claims they helped get a penalty removed in 3 days by using this product. Sounds great doesn't it? Maybe even sounds too good to be true. Well, here is my experience with it. We have been working to get a site's rankings back up for several months now. While it has no penalty, it clearly got hit by the algo change. So we have been very busy creating new content and attempting to remove as much "keyword rich" links as possible. This really hasn't been working very well at all, so when I heard about link detox boost I thought this was the answer to our prayers. The basic idea is link detox boost forces google to crawl your bad links so it know you no longer have links from those sites or have disavowed them. So we ran it and it was NOT cheap. Roughly $300. Now, 3 weeks after running it, the report only shows it has actually crawled 25% of our links, but they assure us it is a reporting issue and the full process has ran its course. The results. No change at all. Some of our rankings are worse, some are better, but nothing worth mentioning. Many products from Link Research Tools are very good, but i'm afraid this isn't one of them. Anyone else use this product? What were your results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper2 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
100 + links on a scrolling page
Can you add more than 100 links on your webpage If you have a webpage that adds more content from a database as a visitor scrolls down the page. If you look at the page source the 100 + links do not show up, only the first 20 links. As you scroll down it adds more content and links to the bottom of the page so its a continuos flowing page if you keep scrolling down. Just wanted to know how the 100 links maximum fits into this scenario ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0