Crawl errors which ones should i sort out

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi, just had my website updated to joomla 3.0 and i have around 4000 urls not found. now i have been told i need to redirect these but i would just like to check on here to make sure i am doing the right thing and the advice i have been given is not correct.

I have been told these errors are the reason for the drop in rankings.

I need to know if i should redirect all of these 4,000 urls or only the ones that are being linked to from outside of the site.

I think about 3,000 of these have no links from outside of the site, but if i do not redirect them all then i am going to keep getting the error messages. around 2,000 of these url not found are from the last time we updated the site which was a couple of years ago and i thought they would have died off now.

any advice on what i should do would be great

[Chris.Menke]

Tim,

Minimally, you want to redirect the pages that have external links and that get traffic from search.  If you don't redirect pages that do have links to them from other pages on your website, each time the site is crawled, you will continue to get those errors--it seems you must have have carried over a bunch of old links from your old site if you still had 2000 not found errors.

It is possible that those not found errors impacted your search results but it could be other things, too.  You should work your way through eliminating the obvious errors as quickly as you can so you can get to any other problems if that's what's causing your problem.

[ClaireH-184886]

thank you for this, so work on the ones that have links from outside of the site first, should i then deal with the other ones that have links from inside the site, and can you let me know what you mean by eliminating the obvious errors

[Chris.Menke]

By fixing obvious errors, I mean fixing the ones that are showing up in the crawl report (and 404 errors caused by external links to missing pages) .  It is possible that there are also other things that are contributing to your drop in traffic but take care of these first and if the problem persists, start digging into your analytics for other problems.

[ClaireH-184886]

thanks. I will start to sort it all now and see what happens.