Used a free WP theme and now Webmaster Tools has shown hundreds of broken links

[Beetlebum]

Hello everyone,

We've recently launched two new music instrument listing websites.

One in the US  http://www.yourinstrument.com

One in AU  http://www.yourinstrument.com.au

While we're waiting for our custom, branded WP to be built,  I went and put up one of the free themes with closely matching colors. Clearly, this was a mistake because now my WMT account has spit out around 200 'not found' errors  and my Moz account is calling them around 282 'dupe page titles' and 'content'???

1. Aren't WP outbound links supposed to be 'nofollow' ?  / Why is my theme creating strange links?

2. Can I clean all these up with assigning rel=canonical to the original blog post? Do I need to wait for the new theme to be installed and then 301 the random URLs found by Moz and WMT ?

weird link examples:

http://imgur.com/Cm6pO5H

Please help  

[Saijo.George]

1. By default WP outbound links are follow links - u can use plugins to change that behaviour

2. There is no point having rel=canonical on 404 pages , since the search engine spiders won't crawl them

I have had good experience with using http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/ for my redirection issues , you can try that . If you are not familiar with wordpress get someone who knows their way around wordpress to give you a hand

Your permalinks looks really weird http://www.yourinstrument.com.au/blog/**index.php**/**2013/06**/gigging-musicians-guide-principals-professionalism/ with index.php in between the domain and the post title. I have seen that come up on IIS servers. You can read this for more info on how to avoid that http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks . It's also a good idea to get rid of the date from the url .

I would seriously consider hiring someone to have a look over how things are setup on the site.

[MoosaHemani]

Ok, so you are saying your webmaster tool says tons of 404 errors and your Moz account says multiple duplicate titles....

404s: This will not be easy but you can fix it...all you have to do is to identify all the 404 pages and then the pages that are most relevant to them... use the redirect plug-in and redirect all the 404 pages to most relevant 200 (active pages) pages available on the website.

Duplicate titles: For Duplicate Titles all you have to do is to identify all the duplicates and feature update with unique titles accordingly!

Note: Usually using a Free WP theme is a shitty idea as they are not SEO friendly and contains tons of development faults!

Hop this helps!