GOOGLE Server Errors & Page not found Errors increased????

[BizDetox]

Hey guys. I am having some issues when i switched over to a new server about a month ago.

Recently i have been getting emails from google webmaster files saying that my server errors have gone up to 94 and page not found is up to 2800

I know i did something wrong i just dont know the process of what i did wrong.

I had about 4 months ago restructured my url structure and DID NOT do a 301 redirect because i figure my site was just new and no need to. I am wondering if thats whats causing my page errors now after 6 months>?

I have attached the files here

http://ge.tt/2er5kmd

If anyone can just give me some direction on what i did wrong it would be helpful .

Thanks

[Robert_G]

Hi there,

I think everyone has some sort of error reports in Webmaster tools.

However, after analyzing your .cvs files:

1. Your 404 error reports are just a note that those pages are not there anymore. It is something normal.

You should of permanent 301 redirect all those link to their new locations. It is not late, you can still do that. After you finish, check if everything works properly, rebuild your sitemap and resubmit it, tick all those boxes an fixed.

5. Your 500 server error notifications:

You have some miss-configured lines in your .htaccess. These errors are usual caused by multiple redirects which neither the server or search engines can handle. E.g. You have a URL like:

domain.com/component/content/online-marketing-community/online-marketing-community/index.php/services/social-marketing

there are two URLs in this URL.

[BizDetox]

I tried to contact my Hosting company to tell them that the server was providing us an error they said that the 500 server errors are the fact that there are url in structure which are nor properly SEO. They are saying its an SEO error not the server error. Actually i had them transfer the files for me and i am affraid they did something wrong with the transfer bec ever since then i have been getting errors left and right,  My site was down for like 2 days because it was only serving the homepage and not any other pages it was a mess.

Now as far as the redirect. - are saying to look at all 2800 not found url and redirect them .

and iam not sure i understood completely about the 500 errors quite yet . can you further explain in detail please

[Robert_G]

Hamping, no, I am not saying to enter 2800 lines in your .htaccess

I was suggesting that you should create one general redirect rule. If only the permalink structure changed, it is possible. Could you give me an example of a URL that now returns 404, and it's new permalink?

As for the 500 errors: sometimes, when configured improperly, some .htaccess rules may cause conflicts, redirect loops and more.

You need to analyze the redirect rules you have in .htaccess.

Another approach (but it will not be a great user experience and many don't recommend it) is to 301 redirect all your 404's to your homepage. It is just an option I am not recommend it either.

[AlanMosley]

500 errors are server errors. I cant see how they could be called SEO errors.

as for the 404's if you have no links pointing to the pages, then let them be, they will eventually disappear, if they have links worth keeping the do a 301.

If your site is new as you suggest, then I doubt you have many links to worry about.

[NaescentAdam]

Hey Hampig,

Looks like you are running a joomla site, I see you went from the initial ID way of handling articles to the SEF way and I think that is causing the problems.

First things first though like Baldea says you need to find out what errors you have, where they are coming from and why.

If you go to Webmaster Tools -> Heatlh -> Crawl Errors  and click on one of the errors you can see the URL linking to your unavailable page. Also try the new link section and see if people have recently found your old site map or something and are linking from that.

I think though the problem is probably a bad extension or something similar. I ran Xenu on your web address and it returned a few 404 errors. But interestingly it also returned errors saying Forbidden Access (flooding), this looks to be a security "feature" of the SH404SEF extension used to handle your SEF requests (this is a guess whether you have it though). If too many requests come in it returns a forbidden error I guess to stop people flooding your server. This could be where Google is running up against errors. Maybe its trying to crawl your site but gets a flooding request and returns a 404 error or something similar

In order for me to run Xenu I had to drop it down to one thread so that I didnt cause too many flood errors. Eventually Xenu gave me this..

| ok | 822 URLs | 82.70% |
| connection aborted | 1 URLs | 0.10% |
| forbidden request | 30 URLs | 3.02% |
| not found | 21 URLs | 2.11% |
| skip external | 95 URLs | 9.56% |
| no info to return | 25 URLs | 2.52% |
| Total | 994 URLs | 100.00% |

As you can see 7.5% of your urls return errors when running a crawl bot against it. I bet you woudn't get this from a user, well maybe a power user opening many many tabs. You would still get the 404 errors though.

So the fact you have lots of 404 errors, Forbidden Request errors, and odd things happening with SEF i would recommend looking at your SEF Extension and see if that is causing you some problems.

Also dont be afraid to look in your server logs. Use Notepad++ to search through it. Find an example error and search for that through the log, give you lots of info (maybe too much though if you are just starting out).

Adam

edit:

you are also running JCH_Optimise to group your CSS and Javascript files. This can cause 500 errors. Try clearing the cache and run xenu against it.

[BizDetox]

Adam you think disabling the SEF404 feature will fix the problem.

[BizDetox]

Bec i am not sure if iam running the Joomla Sef feature or the SEF404. I have installed SEF404 but i dont think i have configured it !

[NaescentAdam]

If you have a development server I would run some tests on it. Or even run wamp and copy your installation over. Just be careful against the change in url structure at the base from site to localhost or similar.

I think you have multiple problems. 404, 500 and Flooding at first glance.

Baldea says you have some misconfigured lines in htaccess and joomla and the extensions will modify that.

Personally I would take out the extension or disable it. Turn off Joomla SEF and use a clean .htaccess file from installation if feasible. Then build it all again.

Make sure to ask yourself if you really need the extension to handle SEF or if Joomla can do it for you. Save complications..

Adam