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Yes, you do need to redirect. They are actually different URLs. It's like you moved from 123 Fifth Avenue to 123 Fifth Street.

You can do a crawl of up to 3000 URLs from http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test, which would let you know if the site is still giving off 404s. Also, you could run a server header checker tool to see what header codes the URLs give and make sure they're not returning a 404 even though they're loading fine.

Diane,

In another thread, you mention Google had problems accessing your site. Could this be a symptom of Google having access problems is that they couldn't find the verification either?

Matt Cutts answered that on a YouTube video a couple of years back at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qigo05nAqKw. I've copied the transcript of his answer below.

In general, we don't promise that site colon queries will rank in the exact same order that other pages would rank in. So we do use a few different factors. We do use some version, roughly, of page rank, but it's not exactly in page rank order. We also look a little bit at, for example, maybe how short the URL is, and those tend to be URLs at the root page or one directory down, and those tend to be the pages that would attract the most links anyway. So it's kind of a combination to sort of trying to surface the pages that we think are useful, either according to page rank, or interesting in terms of being relatively short, so it's something that's pretty important or pretty close to your root page.

But I wouldn't necessarily say that, and it's not the case, that it's strictly in page rank order or anything like that, at least the last time that I checked. So it's a relatively good proxy of the pages that might be kind of interesting, but I wouldn't treat it as a perfect list. You can always go through your server logs and figure out which pages are driving the most traffic, and sometimes those are going to be deep URLs, for example, that might get a very specific link or that rank for some other reason.

Dr. Pete goes into some detail about the canonical tag at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-page-is-canonical.

It's basically telling Google that "I can't fix this with a 301, but domain.com/page1, domain.com/page1/, and domain.com/page1.php are all really the exact same page even though it has three different URLs, and the canonical URL is the one that I want you to show as the real URL"

Toolbar page rank only updates a few times a year. Usually the best use for it is selling or links. Otherwise, a much better metric to look at is how is your traffic doing, are you getting visitors, conversions, etc.

When looking at duplicate content, we look at the code on the page as well as the text. If the only thing different between two pages is a couple of words, we're going to flag that as duplicate content.

The best suggestion is to write unique content that involves more than swapping out a few words.

Dana, you might also want to contact Bing at https://support.discoverbing.com/eform.aspx?productKey=bingwebmaster&ct=eformts&scrx=1\. I sent a quick note on Twitter to Duane Forrester and that's the URL he provided.

Charles, saying that "Google will penalize you" for doing something is a fairly strong statement. Can you point to your source on this subject? It's helpful to give additional information in cases like this.

There are a couple of different components here. The back link count is updated every 2-4 weeks, when Mozscape is updated. We have our own crawler, just as other sites have their own crawlers, so we'll all have different numbers depending on how many URLs we've crawled that cycle.

Wouldn't it look a tad odd to the search engines to have a site that didn't like out? Are you trying to do this for all of your links, or just some? Can you give a little more background to your question?

I'd suggest the redirection plugin for Wordpress. You can easily redirect the missing pages to the correct pages without having to create any pages. It also logs 404s for you, and you can create redirects from the 404 log

The OP is on wordpress.com, not self-hosted wordpress, so that may not be an option. I'm asking another associate to come in and add some comments to this post.

SEOmoz has a recommended list at http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended.

This page references several reasons why only one page may be crawled. If it isn't any of these reasons, please contact our help desk. Thanks!

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-Why-Isn-t-My-Site-Being-Crawled-You-re-Not-Crawling-All-My-Pages-

Thomas,

Do you have some resources that can give details about knowing for a fact it will hurt your rank?

Thank you for pointing out Dr. Pete's post at http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many regarding how many links is too many, as that is a good discussion about this report.

Thomas, I think the voice recognition software botched some of your reply. Could you go through and edit it a little? There are some words that seem to be missing. Thanks!

Are you speaking of the site that's listed in your Moz profile?

If only people realized how much good information members drop in Q&A...

Once again, thanks for this EGOL!

If you want nothing on that test subdomain indexed, verify that subdomain as its own site in Google Webmaster Tools, exclude that subdomain from being indexed in robots.txt, then request removal of that site (subdomain) in GWT.

And consider setting up a page monitor like https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php on the robots.txt of your test site (and live site). It'll check the contents of those pages once a day, and email you if there's a change. Handy if there are multiple people working on the site.