Huge uptick in 404s on new website
-
I just launched a new website, and I see that the 404s shot up hugely in Google Webmaster Tools right during the launch. We went from Drupal to WordPress, but I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on whether these 404s represent a crisis, or potentially something harmless? There has been no noticeable SEO downtick in terms of keywords or queries during the same period...
Thanks for any thoughts.
-
Christy: I think that the answers have been helpful, but the jury is still out. I'm taking advice from both Patrick and Toby's input, and I'll update this space as soon as I see some changes.
The one question that I don't see answered is: are these 404s definitely harming the website's SEO, assuming that they are NOT being visited by users? I'd love to know what people think on that.
-
Hi there, thanks for your question! You've received some good responses. Did any of them help resolve you resolve your issue? We'd love an update, thanks!
Christy
-
"We went from Drupal to WordPress"
That seems like a very backwards move to me, that should be the other way around
(My personal opinion anyway)
On the 404s though, any URL changes will cause problems, you will need to add in redirects to deal with those.
On a drupal specific note, if your old site was using the 'URL Redirect' module, you may have had a number of redirects in place in the database, these wouldn't have been in your .htaccess file and will no longer work after moving to wordpress.
-
Hi there
Did you change URLs at all? Did you check your URL mapping before launching the site? Take a look at your sitemap (then submit to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools) and internal links as well to see if there are any issues.
Take a look at this guide from Moz as well on a site migration. This will be a huge help.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments! Good luck!
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
-
Redirecting old Sitemaps to a new XML
I've discovered a ton of 404s from Google's WMT crawler looking for mydomain.com/sitemap_archive_MONTH_YEAR. There are tons of these monthly archive xmls. I've used a plugin that for some reason created individual monthly archive xml sitemaps and now I get 404s. Creating rules for each archive seems a bad solution. My current sitemap plugin creates a single clean one mydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml. How can I create a redirect rule in the Redirection WP plugin that will redirect any URL that has the 'sitemap' and 'xml' string in it to my current xml sitemap? I've tried using a wildcard like so: mysite.com/sitemap*.*, mysite.com/sitemap ., mysite.com/sitemap(.), mysite.com/sitemap (.) but none of the wildcard uses got the general redirect to work. Is there a way to make this happen with the WP Redirection plugin? If not, is there a htaccess rule, and what would the code be for it? Im not very fluent with using general redirects in htaccess unfortunately. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
Redesiging website and how to prevent a SEO disaster?
Hey guys, I'm in the process of re designing my company website. This website runs in Kentico CMS and now I'm moving to drupal CMS. The main reason for the move is that I need a more flexible design with responsiveness and integrate better social aspects. Currently I'm having to deal with a developer whom can't be bothered to update the site. I also find kentico extremely difficult to deal with. The site has good Google rankings and I was thinking about setting up some 301 redirects when the move is completed. Now the question is this site is been live for over 2 years and I have tons of blog posts sitting in here. How can I get these moved? When this is done will they lose their 'age' ? What if I re create the blog posts as it is and then setup 301 re-directs on this? I have G+ authorship and will they be affected by this? Last question is having a responsive site will affect my SEO rankings once moved? I heard the 301 is not considered as a 'safe' thing with Google so what are my options? If anyone can share a link(s) to site upgrades/moving to new design tutorials/best practices articles based on SEO ill be grateful. Thank you very much.
Technical SEO | | Suganthan0 -
Website Down
Hello guys, My website hasn't been reachable for couple of hours today and I can't really understand why as no links have been built, all the best practices have been followed regarding on page optimization. I also checked google webmaster tools and there are no warning messages, crawl problems or anything so I don't understand why this has happened. Now for some reason the website is up and running again.
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar1 -
Document.referrer Is that harmful to my website?
Someone (maybe my Competitors) open a subdomain on tumblr.com. Just like keywordxxx.tumblr.com , and use following script to redirect to my website. var s=document.referrer; if(s.indexOf("google")>0 || s.indexOf("bing")>0 || s.indexOf("yahoo")>0 || s.indexOf ("aol")>0){ self.location='mywebsiteurl'; } so , If anyone seach in google ,and click on keywordxxx.tumblr.com , this script will direct the user to my website. I have found many cases like that, is that harmful ? how can i avoid that?
Technical SEO | | sunvary0 -
Optimizing Flash websites
Does anyone know the latest on how well Google is indexing flash sites? I'm talking to a prospect now whose site is 100% flash, but looking at it all the content within the site is indexed and returning in the results. This is promising enough, but does anyone know exactly how well Google is indexing flash content these days and are there still any problems with that? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MattBarker0 -
As a wholesale website can our independent retailer's website use (copy) our content?
As a wholesaler of villa rentals, we have descriptions, images, prices etc can our agents (independent retailers) use the content from our website for their site or will this penalize us or them in Google rankings?
Technical SEO | | ewanTHH0 -
Massive amount of 404s after forum prune
So I pruned my vbulletin forum the other week and now webmaster tools detects over 4000 urls as not found. Is there a solution to this? Is this something that could negatively effect rankings? Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | TheTippingPoint0 -
Images on page appear as 404s to Googlebot
When I fetch my website as Googlebot it returns 404s for all the images on the page. This despite the fact that each image is hyperlinked! What could be causing this issue? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Netpace0