Sitemap issue - Tons of 404 errors

[JanetJ]

We've recreated a client site in a subdirectory (mysite.com/newsite) of his domain and when it was ready to go live, added code to the htaccess file in order to display the revamped website on the main url. These are the directions that were followed to do this: http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory and http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress#When_Your_Domain_Name_or_URLs_Change. This has worked perfectly except that we are now receiving a lot of 404 errors am I'm wondering if this isn't the root of our evil.

This is a WordPress self-hosted website and we are actively using the WordPress SEO plugin that creates multiple folders with only 50 links in each. The sitemap_index.xml file tests well in Google Analytics but is pulling a number of links from the subdirectory folder.

I'm wondering if it really is the manner in which we made the site live that is our issue or if there is another problem that I cannot see yet. What is the best way to attack this issue? Any clues?

The site in question is www.atozqualityfencing.com

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

[JanetJ]

Thanks again for the awesome help. I really appreciate your time and effort!!

[LesleyPaone]

I don't think it would snowball. It should be the end of the issue, as I think google will have found all of the pages it is going to find. You might have some more popup like tags pages and thing like that, but nothing major. I don't know if your webmaster is letting you see the webmaster tools or not, but it has an error date of when it last detected the error. It should look like this, http://screencast.com/t/5a9lpC6o  then you can click on the link and pull this window up, http://screencast.com/t/boyAdXGoOLl From there you can see if the links were internal or external that were triggering the 404 pages. It could very well be that external backlinks were triggering them. If they are internal links, to be safe I would search the source of the pages for the links.

Also, Moz's crawler should pick up the 404 errors and let you know if it is still because of links on the site. The 301 redirects will handle the issue if the links were from the old site, but if the links are because of internal links on the new site that are broken, I would find them and fix them with Moz's crawler or Ravens Crawler.

[JanetJ]

Thank you for your insight Lesley! If we do as you suggest, will that be the end of the issue or could it snowball? Wouldn't you think that if there were changes to the site after Google indexed it the next crawl by Google would correct it? Is there a way to get Google to crawl it immediately? Probably not, huh? lol

[LesleyPaone]

This one is really difficult to tell what has actually gone wrong. I am thinking there might have been changes to the site once google indexed the site for the first time and the point it is at now. I went to the internet archive and I could not see many of the pages, so I do not really know.

The fix however is to write 301 redirects for all of the pages that are pulling a 404, but there is a page that represents them. It looks like some of the pages might have had a url change and others might have been done away with.

[JanetJ]

Thanks for your reply, Lesley. I am checking with the developer as to which exact steps she took to make the site live from a subdirectory. Some of the 404 pages include:

http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite/feed/
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/fencing-styles/
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/fence-materials/conact
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/newsite/conact/
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/faq/wood-fencing-gallery
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/faq/vinyl-fencing-gallery
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/faq/structures-gallery
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/faq/horse-fencing-gallery
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/faq/horse-shelter-gallery
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/conact
http://www.atozqualityfencing.com/author/aaron-smith/wood-fencing-gallery

There are a total of 210 of them.

What other information can I provide to help get this figured out?

[LesleyPaone]

It is really hard to tell without seeing the errors. Are the pages at the same address as the previous pages? Did you redirect them? Is there something internally wrong that is hard to tell? It would be easier to diagnose if we could the a list of the 404 pages.