404 errors

[Chris__Chris]

I am seeing alot of 404 erros recently but all seem to be pages like

http://www.finalduties.co.uk/2011/06/21/legal-services-board-to-investigate-will-writers/feed/

(FEED) at the end of the URL

also http://www.finalduties.co.uk/2011/06/23/rules-are-complex-when-it-comes-to-dying-intestate/?wpmp_switcher=desktop

( I know this wpmp_switcher is from a mobile ready plugin we used a while back which has since been removed after duplicating many pages.

also ?wpmp_switcher=desktop is in my robots txt file to help block the robots from crawling these pages and displaying 404's but its still happening, Ihave 700+ 404 errors most ending in feed /tag and ?wpmp_switcher=desktop

Any Ideas I know that 404's aren't that bad but seeing so many this morning I need to figure out why these are coming up all of a sudden. We have been getting these since our site was accidently taken down a while back, trying to figure out why we have lost so many rankings.

we seem to have SERPS like YOYO's from 1 day to the next one keyword goes up but 150 and then next day drops same the next day???any ideas?

Seems SEO posr penguin is one big contadiction, some seo experts give you one bit of advice another gives you another very confsuing.

Thanks

Elissa

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Elissa

It seems that you have a couple of things going on here:

1. That URL relates to a piece of content on your site yet you are not using that permalink structure any longer so:

http://www.finalduties.co.uk/2011/06/23/rules-are-complex-when-it-comes-to-dying-intestate/

Is now

http://www.finalduties.co.uk/probate/rules-are-complex-when-it-comes-to-dying-intestate/

Also, if we google a chunk of text from an indexed blog post we see another site that is indexing your feed so, Google this:

"When someone dies they usually leave behind a will, which contains their last wishes on how to divide up their assets or estate to the family they left behind."

This shows the feed sites that seem to go to the correct URL but it warrants a little more investigation.

If you wanted to sort out the 404's you could always remove

To be honest, it seems you have a few configuration problems and possibly some indexation issues as well and I would try to do a bit of an SEO audit to ensure everything is all squared off and that you are not generating these URLs internally.

You are also serving up content on two different URLs:

http://www.finalduties.co.uk/2011/06/23/rules-are-complex-when-it-comes-to-dying-intestate/

http://www.finalduties.co.uk/probate/rules-are-complex-when-it-comes-to-dying-intestate/

So, making sure the old 301's to the new would help clear that up. You could also do the same thing with the /feed/ URLs to help clean things up more quickly.

Also

If we use the

site:www.finalduties.co.uk

query and then add &start=990 to the end we can see the dreaded:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 170 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

This means you likely have some older (duplicate) urls indexed. I had the briefest of looks and found at least three different URL variations:

page_id=x

year/month/day/name

category/name

---

I have probably made it sound a bit worse than it is but you should really consider an SEO audit if you have big traffic problems to get a really clear picture on what is going on and then any advice can be given based on what that uncovers.

It is likely just some fiddling around has been done in the WP backend and subsequently you have some URL based duplication (and possibly other problems).

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[Chris__Chris]

thank you for the advice, Is it best for me to take the current 700 404s and re-direct them permanant?

How have all these old URL's suddenly have come back?

As for the feed, I have no idea what that is,

thanks

[Chris__Chris]

We had a problem last year and our site was taken down by accident, I lost a years worth of work as we had no full backup, just a backup of the previous year, Once we were back up and on this is where all our problems started.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey

I would leave the 404s if they are not causing lots of user problems, they will go of their own accord in time.

Argghhh re the backup, install VaultPress, it is part of jetpack or can be downloaded and for $15 a month you have the best back up system money can buy (daily back ups, easy restore, DB and files!).

I can't really feed back on the URLs without looking at teh backend but it would seem when you put your site back up, it was likely misconfigured and used a different permalink structure.

Shooting from the hip there but let me know how you get on!

Marcus

[Chris__Chris]

Thanks Marcus,

There are 700 of them I know its ok to have a few but surely if google keep seeing this amount of pages that aren't there it will Pi** them off??

. What i dont get is these pages (404) have appeared out of no where! the site was good no 404s, no broken links and then boom! 700 ! its madness..

My rankings just get worst, The other day I woke up and had some very positive  keyword changes.. Only to get to today and lose them all. Up and down like yo yo's. I don't even rank for our main keyword "probate" anymore. I worked very hard last year and we were number 7 page 1.. now we arent even in the first 200 search..May have been penalised, but why on earth would google tease me they way they do? One minute everything moves and I have 30 + keywords on page 1 to wake the next day and there be 4 on page one then the next day back up!

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, these kind of big changes across the board are rarely a good thing. If you can clean up those 404s with some simple rewrites it won't hurt.

In fact, here is what i would do.

1. Install the redirection plugin for wordpress

2. enable the logging in that plugin and it will log all 404's

3. As each 404 turns up in the redirection log then quickly enable a 301 to the most relevant page

it is going to be a bit of a process but cuts out the risk of manual dodgy redirects.

If you want to email me you login details I could take a 5 minute look at the permalink configuration for you and try to feed back on that as well to make sure you don't have any other issues.

Cheers

Marcus

[Chris__Chris]

Thanks Marcus will take you up on that because I have now woke to hundreds of Canonical errors, something has to be wrong with my wordpress, to keep getting so many issues, I am now showing duplicate posts,

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey,

Okay, couple of things.

It seems the SEOMoz crawler is picking up the WordPress shortlink. This is not really a problem and the two pages have the same canonical URL and both feature this exact piece of markup.

So, these two pages:

http://www.finalduties.co.uk/probate/mother-and-daughter-found-guilty-of-forging-will/

href='http://www.finalduties.co.uk/?p=1011

Both feature:

Explained

What we are seeing here is not duplicates but the seomoz crawler just not picking up the canonical for some reason so this is kind of misleading. I have seen this before though and will flag it with Dr. Pete as he fed back onto a previous discussion about this.

So, you could ignore this. Or, you could remove the shortlink url for cleaner reporting. Either way, I would not worry about it too much!

I added a line to your functions.php file that will remove the shortlink (and tested it).

remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_shortlink_wp_head', 10, 0 );

I then commented this out with // so if you want to remove the shortlink to simplify the reporting then just remove the // from functions.php (or give me a shout).

Hope that helps!
Marcus