404 like crazy after merging blog

[greenjoe]

So I merged my wordpress.com blog to my wordpress biz site and I now have a lot of 404's and way to many pages popping up. SEOMOZ crawl shows 290+ pages but my sitemap is only 95 pages...  It is also showing on my webmaster tools for having a lot of new errors. Any ideas?

[HandsomeWeb]

Fix them fast.  Look for commonalities in the errors.

Relative Links in Template Files Cause 404 Errors

You may notice a bad link in the header.php file.  If you fix that link, you will fix a bad link on every page.  If the link in the header is relative (e.g. href="/contact-us/") there will be broken links on pages on categories and tags, and more.  For example a the page http://www.example.com/category/goats/page-2/  is going to have a link to http://www.example.com/category/goats/page-2/contact-us/ because of the relative link in the header.php file.

In a template page, links should use the full domain, like below:

[Contact Us](<?php echo esc_url( home_url( '/' ) ); ?>/contact-us/)

Relative Links in Content Causes 404 Errors

Relative links between pages on your old site may have broken when you moved your content into word press.  If you have a link to your contact form in the text of your web pages, it will be broken.  Although you may need to do these individually, it is quick to locate.

Extra Pages?

Extra pages is puzzling. How did you merge the blogs?

[greenjoe]

I used the wordpress importer.  I am not a programer so honestly I have little to no idea how to change the html issues.  Some reason a page 404 page is made for every tag and category from the blog I imported.  I deleted all of the tags and it is still an issue.  I am sure that is hurting my SERP... Is there no plugin that can fix this?

[greenjoe]

Here is an example. webmaster tools says that http://realgreencleaning.com/tag/eco-friendly/ is linked from http://realgreencleaning.com/weatherproofing-the-house/ but there is no tag....  now that first link is 404.  All tags were removed after the first SEOMOZ crawl because it was showing so many tag page issues.

[HandsomeWeb]

If you didn't alter the template files, then that is probably not an issue

[HandsomeWeb]

There is no link from that page to the 'tag' page - I checked.

If you deleted the tags, then you have probably fixed the issue.  Check when Webmaster Tools last crawled your site.  It was probably before you removed the tags, so the problem should be gone after the next crawl.

Do submit a sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools, it helps with the crawl.  There are free sitemap generators on the web.  I don't recommend using a WordPress Plugin for generating a sitemap because I like to use as few plugins as possible.

But with WordPress you need to use one of the plugins to rewrite titles and avoid duplicate content issues.

[greenjoe]

So  I ran another crawl test and either /tile-grout-cleaning/ or /www.realgreencleaning.com/ is being added to the end to every 404.   I checked the widgets and they look fine so not sure why this is being added to every page thus causing all of the 404's.  Google crawled a couple of days ago and it is still pooping up errors.

[greenjoe]

I deleted all of the imported posts and reimported them with all tags and categories removed prior to import.  hopefully this will clear it up.  Out of crawls for the day to see if it worked.