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Yes i'll do that thanks

It's not a problem, just fix those as soon as you can. And yes, it does affect crawl rate from what I've seen.

Hi there, as Takeshi said, it is difficult to answer this without more information (especially how you are implementing password protection on these pages.) Are you able to offer any information at all, or did you figure this out? We'd love an update so we can help you resolve this. Christy

Masbro, sounds like a bait and switch tactic, which stinks. However, you can now approach it from 2 additional angles for your client: 1) Have them pay for 1 month of cPanel access at that $45 rate, then get in there, take a complete back up of the website files and database file (if a CMS like WordPress) and then create a new web hosting account in HostGator or GoDaddy or anywhere feasible to your client and a server you're used to working in. Or 2) Just request from that company a full, most recent backup copy of the website files and DB and then you can upload those files to a new host as noted above, then change the DNS records for the domain to point to the new server. I'd find out that cost and see which is the cheaper alternative, however, either way, I would get your client away from them and cancel any monthly fees. Move on and with you by their side! NOTE: Careful with the email hosting. So make sure you know where their email is hosted if using the same domain. If setting up a new host with their backup copy, then you can figure out the Mail settings/MX records as needed to make any modifications necessary. Hope you get things resolved! It sounds like they are willing to play ball, so that's a huge plus for you and the client. Patrick

We have changed the URLS a few times over the past decade. It is just maintaining some of the super old backlinks to category and product pages that are getting harder to maintain. I appreciate you taking the time to answer.

http://schema-creator.org/. IDK if that'll help you.

Click on my name and then use the 'private message this user' button towards the bottom on the left. -Andy

Thanks so much, Kate!

Great thanks microdesign and iQseo

Before using all the content from the site, I'd suggest that you run it through a plagiarism checker. Many turnkey sites use the same content in addition to using the same photos in their templates. That could be part of the reason for the poor performance of the existing site. If it's already duplicated content, then you're better off re-writing those pages from scratch.

Thank you for the reminder! I believe these have all been switched over, but I'll give it another look to be sure! Kaylie

Great, the good news is following submission of a sitemap via Webmaster Tools, things appear to be remedied on Google! It does seem, however, that the issue still persists on Bing/Yahoo. Some of the 404's are links from an old site that weren't carried over following my redesign; so that will be handled shortly as well. I've submitted the sitemap via Bing Webmaster Tools, as such I presume it's a similar matter of simply 'waiting on Bing'? Many thanks for your valuable insight!

Well, after submitting multiple temporary sitemaps and having Google index them, our duplicate counts dropped back to pre-event levels. However, our rankings haven't improved at all. Actually, if anything, they dropped even further. At this point it's really starting to look like this is a hit from Panda 4.1 and that we had our URLs change was merely a coincidence. From the looks of it, Google is now marking our site as a low quality site. Now that we know about such a thing, we definitely experienced a 'sinister surge' prior to disaster striking. Since we've never engaged in any bad behavior on the site and we've always followed google's best practice advice, we're currently at a loss of what could be the reason that we're hit that way. Our content is fresh and high quality (arguably the highest quality in our domain), we have a very decent link profile according to MajesticSEO, so for now, no clue about what's going on really. Attached is the site's impressions and clicks graph from Webmaster Tools. PAgd8q6.png

Thanks Lynnp for your answer, but unfortunately the suggestions given and documented with those previous Q&As are not valid anymore, because Google has since few months offered a new interpretation to the hreflang/rel="canonical" co-existence issue (read my answer).

Everything is to be as expected - in time Google will adjust appropriately and drop the old domains from the index to include the newest domains (which are 301'ed to the new URL).

No problem. good luck

Hey, There's been a few threads on here about Updowner, but most are about folks trying to block them so they don't push up their backlinks. The good news is, G ignores them anyway. It looks like your HTML template contains code that verifies site ownership with Updowner, which might be used to block Updowner from indexing/creating hundreds of links to the site. I'm not 100% on this, but seeing as no one else has weighed in. I believe the previous site owner has verified that they're the owner of those sites with Updowner. You'd usually do this to block their robots. Excerpt included below: To register, you have to add a meta tag to your index page or you can just upload a verification file, which is easiest.  It’s just like verifying for Google Webmaster Tools. Download the 55 byte file and upload it to your site’s main directory. So, for me, it’s public_html/theseonewsblog. For you it may be www/yourdomain or public_html/yourdomain. (Some folks prefer to use the www directory. Makes no difference.) Once you’ve done that, then plug in your domain at UpDowner and verify your account. At the top of that page, there is a link that says, “Block Site,” and when you click it, UpDowner will not list your site. I’m hoping that means they’ll delete the links they’ve placed pointing to us, too, but well… time will tell. Google ignores Updowner links anyway. but if I were you I'd probably remove that code.

Hi there, I think I spotted this thread over on the Google forums, but it looks like your issue is down to Javascript and the WP plugin you're using. There's no hard and fast fixes for this, but I'd recommend uninstalling the custom search plugin for now, seeing if that resolves the issue. If it does, you can either speak to the developer and notify them of this bug or try a different plugin (there's more than one for custom search). Sources (other incidents of these errors with different plugins): https://wordpress.org/support/topic/google-webmasters-reports-undefined-in-urls-causes-404s http://developer.sharethis.com/forum/read/162482

Thanks a lot, Tom. I appreciate your time and thorough response. This is exactly what I have been looking for to validate my suggestions and assumptions. I have been careful when implementing each and every annotation in the sitemap, I think I get it right and let's see what will happen. Cheers, Annie

Thanks.. it took me a while but I did realise that one eventually.