Problem with 404 and 500 Status code pages

[salvyy]

Dear SeoMozzers,

I have a question related to one of the sites I have recently changed the URL, going from http:example.com to http://www.example.com

I did 301 redirects, as I was recommended to do. In the past month I have noticed an incredible drop in Google's rankings for many keywords and checking the crawling errors appearing in the SEO Crawling Report I have witnessed mayhem with Canonical/301 redirect types of errors.

Now, things seem a little better. I have noticed a reduction in the number of 301 and Canonical type or errors (by the way, I still do not get the Canonical issue :-)). My little questions are the following:

1. Will I ever go back to the positions I used to occupy before I redesigned the site's URL structure?

2. I have now noticed that the SeoMoz Crawling report show "404 Staus" errors and one "505 Status" error. Can somebody please tell me how to fix the 404 Status Errors? Can I fix them by myself, or maybe I can ask the guys at the web hosting company, since I am really bad at taking care of technical issues?

Thank you for the time you took to clarify my doubts.

Ad maiora,

• Sal

[Yanbo]

1. As with most thing SEO related time will tell, there are many factors that can effect your ranking

2. Here's how I do it. Go to seoMoz page with errors, Grab report as cvs, open in Excel, delete all columns except url, status code,referrer. Now sort by status code. Go to referral page and try to find broken link. That should give you better look as to what source of problems can be.

If you want, you can share cvs file and I'm willing to give it a look and see what went wrong.

Kind regards

Bojan

.

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, these things are really tough to diagnose from generalities (you have to be able to dig in and see what's happening on the actual site). Going from the non-www to "www" version should be ok, but any full-scale change can cause short-term rankings bounce. A couple of questions:

(1) Did you only change from non-www to www or did you make other URL changes? Make sure you've mapped every major URL to a new URL - it's easy to miss some.

(2) Are the 301s working and are they single-hop? Test some individual pages with a header checker, like this one:

http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

I think our Firefox toolbar will do it, too.

(3) Are the pages we show as 404s returning 404s (again check the headers)? Should they be? If you have legit pages returning 404s and 50Xs, you've got a problem. Unfortunately, why you're getting 404s is almost impossible to tell from the outside - it's specific to your server/platform.

[salvyy]

Hi Dr. Meyers,

Thank you for the answer.

Your kind analysis is too technical and difficult for me to understand, so I'll just hire someone to check my site. As you may know it is always a risk to put one's site in the hands of other people who claim to know what they are doing in terms of SEO.

I'd like to contact someone who is an expert in WordPress, as my site are all in WordPress. Someone who knows the technical aspect of WordPress and knows how to optimize a WordPress blog. If you know of someone, please kindly let me know in private. If not, no problem and thank you for your time.

Best,

• Sal

[Dr-Pete]

I notice you're a PRO Member - have you submitted this to Private Q&A? We could at least take a look at the site and see how bad the problem looks. Fixing it may still require a WordPress consultant, but diagnosing the severity of the problem is within the scope of Private Q&A.

[salvyy]

Hi Bojan,

Thank you for your feedback. I will follow your recommendation. Just one question: are you able to check the problems that a WordPress site has and fix them?

Thank you.

• Sal

[Yanbo]

Hi salvyy,

It shouldn't be a problem to determine errors and I'm willing to give you recommendation on how to fix them. Just send me cvs file and give me 30 min

Kind regards

Bojan

[salvyy]

Hi,

I will ask a private question in March.

Thank you very much.