Google Crawl Errors from vbseo change

[RudySF]

We have vbseo setup on our site and for some reason a setting was changed unexpectedly and was un-noticed where it changed the URL of all the pages and so none of our pages were getting indexed by google any longer due to 401 errors. Most of our SE traffic fell off.

We discovered the issue a couple weeks ago and we changed the setting back so that the URLs are the same as they were originally before but in Google webmasters it's still showing crawl errors and our search engine traffic hasn't recovered at all. We have sitemaps being sent daily.

[MichaelC-15022]

You'll find that Google will keep retrying those broken links for months.  The frequency will go down, and eventually they'll stop trying.

In the meantime, the changed URLs undoubtedly made a mess of Google's calculations for internal link juice, and you should expect it to take about a month for that to settle back to normal as well.

[RudySF]

Thanks for the feedback. We made the change about 5-6 weeks ago and still not seeing a recovery but the number of links indexed. Here's a screenshot of the drop and non-recovery.

[MichaelC-15022]

That would seem a bit longer than I would have expected.  I would consider adding 301 redirects for all of the "temporary" pages so that those point back to the original/current pages.