I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure out why google stopped crawling.. any help is appreciated

[malady]

Well google made a strong return yesterday.. so that definitely helped. Not sure if they're indexing us (though my sitemap no longer says 16 indexed and now 2000 indexed. And still not positive how many of those are pages and categories, but it looks like some of the posts are starting to make it under site:dajaz1.com

Thank you so much for your help. I'm not sure the issue is fixed ( I currently have all SEO plugins disabled and I'm too scared to turn them on) but at least google is crawling again and the next few days should tell the tale.

Another thing I did was got rid of the sub categories and turned them into tags. Hopefully this will help with the site structure, even if we take an initial hit with 404's at this point I don't want the tags indexed anyway since I want google to focus on the posts.

jeuWV

[Dr-Pete]

Glad to hear there's at least some progress. So often in these cases, I'm seeing that there are multiple things going on, and all you can do is fix them one at a time until the situation gets clearer. Give it a little time and then make the next set of changes - hopefully, it's all cumulative. Just make sure you measure progress and give things time to work. Where I see the most problems is when someone makes a change, it doesn't work in 3-4 days and then they reverse it or pile on new changes. Half the time, Google hasn't even re-cached 90% of the pages at that point.