404 Errors After Site Migration

[ShopChameleon]

Hello -

I'm working on a website selling fashion accessories.  The site just went through a site migration from Yahoo! to Big Commerce.  Now we have a high level of warnings and errors from the crawl.  Few are mentioning sites I never seen before on the Yahoo! platform. I also notice that the pages crawled has doubled.  How can I fix or did I do something wrong with migration?

I was running the website with minimal errors and now overwhelmed with errors all the error updates.  If I can get some assistance on what could be wrong, I would greatly appreciate.

Thanks.

[josh-riley]

Wondering if you can give a bit more background -  so did the migration change your URLs/URL structure? If so, what was your link plan to set up redirects from the old URLs to the new ones? Did you update your site map to indicate to the search engines you've migrated? Did you 404 any old content that you weren't moving?

As for your comment "Few are mentioning sites I never seen before on the Yahoo! platform" I'm not sure what you mean - what sites are you referring to? Yours? Sites that were linking to your old site...?

[ShopChameleon]

Thanks much Andrea, I'm so very new to SEO and all the errors freaking me out!

Yes the migration changed the URL structure.  I thought I went through them very carefully to make sure each URL matched (not sure why not all of the URL successfully submitted with matched URLs).

I also upload all the previous redirects via Yahoo onto the new platform.

I updated the new sitemap to the search engines (Google, Yahoo)

For example, the below links showing as errors and can't figure as too why.  I updated the sitemap:

http://www.shopchameleon.com/a-black-mesh-bow-belt/index.html

http://www.shopchameleon.com/a-black-mesh-bow-belt/privacypolicy.html

http://www.shopchameleon.com/ballerina-cool-earring/testimonials.html

But also strange that when migrated and w/ all these errors the website is getting double amount of traffic??

[josh-riley]

Well, I myself can't tell you why those pages would have errors - I don't know your site to know what is right/wrong or what your folder structure needs to be to ensure the path is correct. Or, as things that have happened to me, for example, in Google Webmaster tools, I'll get notification for 404's to my site pages...even though those pages don't exist. What do I mean? I mean someone linked to my site, but messed up the URL so they (unintentionally) created a bad URL that Google associated with my site. So when you say you have a high amount of errors/warnings, I'd just suggest looking at what  tool is providing that information to determine how credible that is.

As for those URLs you shared, are all those legit pages but aren't rendering correctly? Or, are they not real pages at all but somehow the URL was created in the move? (Someone else may be better at chiming in there other than myself.)

I suggest going back and redirecting all the bad pages to a good page, or serve up your 404 page for any bad links you want to fall out.

Even with errors, sites can do better with traffic if the migration means that the site is more crawlable and that along with the migration, if it's easier for search engines to figure out what your site is about and match it to search queries.