Huge uptick in 404s on new website

[yoursearchteam]

I just launched a new website, and I see that the 404s shot up hugely in Google Webmaster Tools right during the launch. We went from Drupal to WordPress, but I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on whether these 404s represent a crisis, or potentially something harmless?  There has been no noticeable SEO downtick in terms of keywords or queries during the same period...

Thanks for any thoughts.

Screenshot-2015-05-19-13.58.55.png

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Did you change URLs at all? Did you check your URL mapping before launching the site? Take a look at your sitemap (then submit to Google and Bing Webmaster Tools) and internal links as well to see if there are any issues.

Take a look at this guide from Moz as well on a site migration. This will be a huge help.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments! Good luck!

[N1ghteyes]

"We went from Drupal to WordPress"

That seems like a very backwards move to me, that should be the other way around (My personal opinion anyway)

On the 404s though, any URL changes will cause problems, you will need to add in redirects to deal with those.

On a drupal specific note, if your old site was using the 'URL Redirect' module, you may have had a number of redirects in place in the database, these wouldn't have been in your .htaccess file and will no longer work after moving to wordpress.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there, thanks for your question! You've received some good responses. Did any of them help resolve you resolve your issue? We'd love an update, thanks!

Christy

[yoursearchteam]

Christy: I think that the answers have been helpful, but the jury is still out.  I'm taking advice from both Patrick and Toby's input, and I'll update this space as soon as I see some changes.

The one question that I don't see answered is: are these 404s definitely harming the website's SEO, assuming that they are NOT being visited by users?  I'd love to know what people think on that.