Increase in Not Found Errors

[AmandaHorne]

Hello All,

Looking for input on an issue I am having.

We used to have a website www.gazaro.com.  It was a price comparison engine for consumers.  A shift in the focus of the business resulted in www.360pi.com - a price intelligence tool for retailers.The two websites have similar themes, so I thought it would be valuable to pass SEO juice from the old domain to the new domain.Back in August, I noticed that Gazaro was redirected to 360pi with a meta refresh.  I know a 301 redirect is preferable to a meta refresh, so we switched to a 301 redirect.Since that happened, there has been a spike in 404 errors in webmaster tools. If you hover over the url, it is actuallywww.360pi.com/deal/amazon etc etc.  It is looking for gazaro urls on the 360pi domain - which don't exist. I think this is hurting our homepage ranking.  Our homepage no longer ranks for "price intelligence" when it used to be in pos. 4 or 5.  As it turns out, we are ranking #1 for "price intelligence" but with our product page.I'm wondering why the 404 are happening.  Is something setup in correctly?  Or should I have them switch back to a meta refresh.Thoughts?  Thanks for your help PNM1cYO

[BeanstalkIM]

I'd have to see more detail to know what the 404 issue is but let me jump in and say that a big problem with the way you've done it is 301ing every page on the domain to the homepage of the new site.  This is saying, "Hey Google, we're not worried about sending the visitors to a page that contains information they want."  I can't say for sure of course (darn Google and their tight lips) but I'd bet dollars to donuts that they're devaluing all your links assuming that nothing is relevant since they can't assume relevancy from the way the redirect site-wide are being handled.

The 301's domain also have a "less than ideal" domains to backlinks ratio so that's likely stacking on top.

Can't answer the question here but thought I'd comment on what might be causing some of your problems.

[crackingmedia]

Hi Amanda

How many 301 redirects do you have on your old site? From what you have said it sounds like just one. Is that correct of have I misunderstood something?

If you have pattern-matched all the URLs from your old site to your new site and if those URLs don't exist on your new site, then a 404 is exactly what you will get.

A single pattern-matched redirect will only work if the relative path on the new site to pages is the same relative path that it was on the old site. So if you have the following:

oldsite.com/big-widgets.html
oldsite.com/little-widgets.html
etc

and you just create a single 301 redirect that says all the pages on oldsite.com have now moved to newsite.com, then the URLs on the new site will be expected to be found at the same relative paths as follows:

newsite.com/big-widgets.html
newsite.com/little-widgets.html
etc

If they are not then you will get 404s.

If your new site has the same pages as on your old site but at a different relative path then the only way to 301 redirect the old URLs is to directly cross reference them. So, for example, if the big-widgets.html page on your new site was now at a URL of widgets-big.html you would need a direct 301 redirect from oldsite.com/big-widgets.html to newsite.com/widgets-big.html for the correct page to be found.

Having rambled on about this it may be that you have done nothing like I have said (sorry about that!), but it's just that when you said "so we switched to a 301 redirect", i.e. that sounds like just one 301 redirect, not many of them.

I hope my ramblings help!

Peter

[AmandaHorne]

Thanks Dave and Peter - your responses are helpful.

You are correct, my goal was to do a server side 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain with the hopes of passing on SEO benefit since the website theme is similar (but targeting different audience consumer vs retailer).  I understand that the poor user experience of this is now likely hurting us since the same relative path does not exist.

I'm going to remove the 301 all together since it is not helping us, and very possibly is hurting us.

[crackingmedia]

Hi Amanda

You could just change your single pattern matched 301 to point all links to your old site to the home page of the new site. That way at least someone who clicks on a link to your old site will find the new site. Also without a 301 for all the links on your old site those old URLs are going to sit around in the indexes of search engines for a long time.

Peter