Sitemaps, 404s and URL structure

[DanielFeldman]

Hi All!

I recently acquired a client and noticed in Search Console over 1300 404s, all starting around late October this year.

What's strange is that I can access the pages that are 404ing by cutting and pasting the URLs and via inbound links from other sites.

I suspect the issue might have something to do with Sitemaps. The site has 5 Sitemaps, generated by the Yoast plugin. 2 Sitemaps seem to be working (pages being indexed), 3 Sitemaps seem to be not working (pages have warnings, errors and nothing shows up as indexed). The pages listed in the 3 broken sitemaps seem to be the same pages giving 404 errors.

I'm wondering if auto URL structure might be the culprit here. For example, one sitemap that works is called newsletter-sitemap.xml, all the URLs listed follow the structure: http://example.com/newsletter/post-title

Whereas, one sitemap that doesn't work is called culture-event-sitemap.xml. Here the URLs underneath follow the structure http://example.com/post-title.

Could it be that these URLs are not being crawled / found because they don't follow the structure http://example.com/culture-event/post-title? If not, any other ideas?

Thank you for reading this long post and helping out a relatively new SEO!

[DanielFeldman]

I'll make my question shorter and hopefully more clear...

If my Permalink structure in Wordpress is set up for a given custom post type, lets call it "culture", as: example.com/postname,

Yet with Yoast, a sitemap is automatically generated for posts tagged with "culture" that looks like example.com/culture/postname

Could that explain why posts being tagged as "culture" are showing up as 404s in Search Console?

[dohertyjf]

Hi Daniel! Thanks for your question.

It's kind of hard to know what's going on without seeing your site. Feel free to PM it to me.

There's definitely a chance that this is the case, but if it's happening with Yoast it is likely a configuration issue on your site not with Yoast's technology. You may need to adjust your tag permalinks within your WordPress admin so that the URLs are correct in your sitemaps.

John