404 like crazy after merging blog
-
So I merged my wordpress.com blog to my wordpress biz site and I now have a lot of 404's and way to many pages popping up. SEOMOZ crawl shows 290+ pages but my sitemap is only 95 pages... It is also showing on my webmaster tools for having a lot of new errors. Any ideas?
-
I deleted all of the imported posts and reimported them with all tags and categories removed prior to import. hopefully this will clear it up. Out of crawls for the day to see if it worked.
-
So I ran another crawl test and either /tile-grout-cleaning/ or /www.realgreencleaning.com/ is being added to the end to every 404. I checked the widgets and they look fine so not sure why this is being added to every page thus causing all of the 404's. Google crawled a couple of days ago and it is still pooping up errors.
-
There is no link from that page to the 'tag' page - I checked.
If you deleted the tags, then you have probably fixed the issue. Check when Webmaster Tools last crawled your site. It was probably before you removed the tags, so the problem should be gone after the next crawl.
Do submit a sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools, it helps with the crawl. There are free sitemap generators on the web. I don't recommend using a WordPress Plugin for generating a sitemap because I like to use as few plugins as possible.
But with WordPress you need to use one of the plugins to rewrite titles and avoid duplicate content issues.
-
If you didn't alter the template files, then that is probably not an issue
-
Here is an example. webmaster tools says that http://realgreencleaning.com/tag/eco-friendly/ is linked from http://realgreencleaning.com/weatherproofing-the-house/ but there is no tag.... now that first link is 404. All tags were removed after the first SEOMOZ crawl because it was showing so many tag page issues.
-
I used the wordpress importer. I am not a programer so honestly I have little to no idea how to change the html issues. Some reason a page 404 page is made for every tag and category from the blog I imported. I deleted all of the tags and it is still an issue. I am sure that is hurting my SERP... Is there no plugin that can fix this?
-
Fix them fast. Look for commonalities in the errors.
Relative Links in Template Files Cause 404 Errors
You may notice a bad link in the header.php file. If you fix that link, you will fix a bad link on every page. If the link in the header is relative (e.g. href="/contact-us/") there will be broken links on pages on categories and tags, and more. For example a the page http://www.example.com/category/goats/page-2/ is going to have a link to http://www.example.com/category/goats/page-2/contact-us/ because of the relative link in the header.php file.
In a template page, links should use the full domain, like below:
[Contact Us](<?php echo esc_url( home_url( '/' ) ); ?>/contact-us/)
Relative Links in Content Causes 404 Errors
Relative links between pages on your old site may have broken when you moved your content into word press. If you have a link to your contact form in the text of your web pages, it will be broken. Although you may need to do these individually, it is quick to locate.
Extra Pages?
Extra pages is puzzling. How did you merge the blogs?
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
-
Will page be marked as 404 if you replace country specific letters from url?
What I'm reffering to is replacement of Polish characters from i.e "ł" to "l" or "ę" to "e". I believe it relates same way as other similar Slavic languages.
On-Page Optimization | | Optimal_Strategies0 -
Google search returns blog homepage, but not article
When I do a google search for a specific article on our blog the search results only return the blog homepage with the article title shown in the meta description, but never the actual article page. I've tried to refine my search by using site: and quotation marks around the article title (e.g site:www.example.com "article title") but still only get the homepage. Our blog is showing up so I assume it's not an indexing issue, but not sure how to get the article pages to show on serps. Any ideas? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | STP_SEO0 -
Getting 404 Errors on Fonts After Website Redesign
Hi, I recently redesigned my website and I changed a few URLs so I have been keeping an eye on 404 errors and setting up redirects as needed. However, my 404 error log keeps getting filled font related URLs like this: <colgroup><col width="960"></colgroup>
On-Page Optimization | | DohenyDrones
| /fonts/AvenirLTStd-Heavy.otf), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Heavy.woff), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Heavy.eot), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Heavy.eot? |
| /fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Black.otf), url(/fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Black.woff), url(/fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Black.eot), url(/fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Black.eot? |
| /fonts/AvenirLTStd-Heavy.otf), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Heavy.woff), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Heavy.eot), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Heavy.eot? |
| /fonts/AvenirLTStd-Book.otf), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Book.woff), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Book.eot), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Book.eot? |
| /fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Bold.otf), url(/fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Bold.woff), url(/fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Bold.eot), url(/fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Bold.eot? |
| /fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Bold.otf), url(/fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Bold.woff), url(/fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Bold.eot), url(/fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Bold.eot? |
| /fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Black.otf), url(/fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Black.woff), url(/fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Black.eot), url(/fonts/FrutigerLTStd-Black.eot? |
| /fonts/AvenirLTStd-Book.otf), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Book.woff), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Book.eot), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Book.eot? |
| /fonts/AvenirLTStd-Heavy.otf), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Heavy.woff), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Heavy.eot), url(/fonts/AvenirLTStd-Heavy.eot? | Any idea what is causing these 404 errors? Is this something that might hurt my SERP?0 -
Duplicate content issue, across site domains (blogging)
Hi all, I've just come to learn that a client has been cross-posting their blog posts to other blogs (on higher quality domains, in some cases). For example - this is the same post on 3 different blogs. http://thebioethicsprogram.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experiment-and-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
On-Page Optimization | | ketanmv
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2014/06/29/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experiment-and-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2014/06/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experimentand-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing.html
And, sometimes a 4th time, on an NPR website. I'm assuming this is doing no one any favors and Harvard or NPR is going to earn the rank most every time. I'm going to encourage them to publish only fresh content on their real blog, would you agree? Can this actually harm the ranking of their blog and website - should we delete the old entries when migrating the blog? They are going to move their Wordpress Blog to hosting on their real domain soon:
http://www.bioethics.uniongraduatecollege.edu/news/ The current set up is not adding any value to their domain. Thank you for any advice! Ketan0 -
Wordpress photo blog with sparse text - noindex posts, index categories?
Hi everyone, I have a wordpress blog that is heavy on photos but short on text - most of my posts consist of a photo linking to a full gallery, and a short description of 1-4 sentences. I've often read recommendations to noindex category pages, but in this case I'm wondering if it might be best to noindex the individual posts instead - I'm concerned that the short posts might seem like thin content to Google compared to the category pages which aggregate the posts. Also, some of my categories reflect keywords that I'd like to rank well for. I have about a dozen categories and close to 1000 posts.
On-Page Optimization | | matt_b0 -
404 Error to homepage
Is there any risk of forwarding 404 links directly to homepage. I already have 404 page but now google showing you have lots of 404 links and some of them i can't control to fix this issue. Is there any problem if i do so for SEO ?
On-Page Optimization | | chandubaba0 -
Duplicate page title - blogs
Hope someone can help me, I am a total SEO noivce so please be gentle. My first report shows that I have duplicate page titles. I have been through and changed all of these so they are different and after my latest crawl they are still showing as duplicates. I am wondering if this is because it;s a blog, here is one of the duplicates: http://www.cottagesoapcompany.co.uk/blog/?row=1 Hope you can help!
On-Page Optimization | | emmamoulden0 -
How to handle pages with no information at the moment, but are not 404?
As people who may have seen my past questions know, I run a small website which acts as a business/review directory for local businesses in a specific niche. Right now every business has a page on a url such as: http://site.com/businesses/business-name which shows the top 5 reviews with a link to the full review list which is located at: http://site.com/businesses/business-name/reviews The problem(?) I have is that even for a business with 0 reviews, the latter URL is available and responds with a 200 status code, but ultimately just says "There aren't any" which results in search terms for "business name reviews" often leading to these dead-end pages when I would rather have them land on the business page itself. How is everyone handling URLs? Until the business has has reviews, this URL is useless, but it is a completely valid URL. Some ideas I've had are in order of what I think is best to worst: Return 200, but with a meta 'noindex' tag if the business has no reviews at the time requested Return 404 if the business has no reviews at the time requested Return 302 back to the main business page if the business has no reviews at the time requested Anyone have any better ideas than above for how to handle this situation? One other option is to completely get rid of the full review list and rework the main business profile page, but that would obviously require a lot more development. I'm looking for the best option in the meantime. Thanks in advance for your insight.
On-Page Optimization | | qurve0