Welcome to the Q&A Forum

FYI - looks like today Yoast pushed out an update, after updating the plugin to version 1.4.1 sitemaps on all of my sites are now correct

Hello,

I'm having a similar issue so perhaps what I add may help/shed light on a fix.

• I am NOT using the W3 Total Cache plugin.
• My website is set up as www. in both WordPress and Google Webmaster Tools
• When I try to view my sitemap:  http://www.alifelessanxious.com/sitemap_index.xml it throws a 404
• Going into Google Webmaster Tools - it is unable to find my sitemap
• Adding the aforementioned .htaccess fix from Marko doesn't work - actually causes my site to flip out

Hi Tommy,

Thanks for the input.  I did an on-page analysis through SEO moz and just fixed a few issues I had (exact keyword was missing from a few elements, though I don't believe we touched these while optimizing the site 6 weeks ago).

The homepage now has a perfect score through the SEO Moz optimization check for "purple bananas" keyword, so I'm hoping that does the trick.

If not, any ideas are appreciated.

Thanks!

Both.

URL is (not literally, fake example):  www.purplebananas.com

Trying to rank well for the search "purple bananas"

Got a weird one here...

Won't give away actual URL but for this example let's say client's site is:

www.purplebananas.com

Many of the longtail keyword-targeted subpages/posts are still ranking pretty well.  We recently went through and optimized the site based on poor scores we found from crawl reports from SEO Moz, which included renaming some sub-pages, eliminating duplicate content pages, archives, etc (it's a wordpress site, about 4 years old).

This site used to rank at the top or near it for the search "purple bananas".

However, after we optimized the site it's almost completely fallen off the radar of Google, turns up way over 100 for the search "purple bananas".

Strangely, if we search "purplebananas" we're at the top still.

Any idea what's going on here?

Are we potentially over-optimized or something weird for our own brand!?

Any troubleshooting tips?

FWIW the changes were made about 6 weeks ago and while we're steadily building links, I don't think this is the standard "Google dance".

Thanks!

Thanks for all the help guys.

@Cardigan Media - This seems to be the best solution.

The website is about 8 years old and we're staying on the same domain, so don't want to lose those existing backlinks.

Cheers,
Steve

Hi guys,

My client has a site built with Cold Fusion (web pages end in .cfm) and we're moving them over to Wordpress (for many reasons), keeping the same menu structure and navigation.

Their previous SEO company was pretty awful, however, they did manage to establish some decent authority/backlinks for the website and its 20 or so pages.

My questions:

• I assume I'll want to do 301 redirects for each page, possibly by editing the .htaccess file?  Any advice on this?
• Anything else I need to consider in this move?

Thanks!

Thanks for all the help guys.

@Cardigan Media - This seems to be the best solution.

The website is about 8 years old and we're staying on the same domain, so don't want to lose those existing backlinks.

Cheers,
Steve