Wordpress Duplicate Content

[BethA]

We have recently moved our company's blog to Wordpress on a subdomain (we utilize the Yoast SEO plugin).  We are now experiencing an ever-growing volume of crawl errors (nearly 300 4xx now) for pages that do not exist to begin with.  I believe it may have something to do with having the blog on a subdomain and/or our yoast seo plugin's indexation archives (author, category, etc) --- we currently have Subpages of archives and taxonomies, and category archives in use.

I'm not as familiar with Wordpress and the Yoast SEO plugin as I am with other CMS' so any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated.  I can PM further info if necessary.  Thank you for the help in advance.

[BethA]

But of course!  You're welcome and thanks for the assistance!

-Marty

[evolvingSEO]

Great Marty! Thanks for letting us know, and glad you got it sorted out.

-Dan

[BethA]

Thank you both for your responses!  I was actually able to figure out the issue on my own, but I appreciate all the helpful advice. All of our redirects from the past blog domain work perfectly and were added by hand, and we are unable to use .htaccess with our servers (quite annoying believe me).  But I greatly appreciate that advice Ben; I'm sure it will help someone with this issue.

The issue that was causing all the errors was our relative path structure on the root domain.  When moving the blog to the subdomain we accidentally left 4 links in the footer as relative paths instead of absolute.  Therefore the bot were attempting to access the root from the subdomain through those relative paths, which in-turn created multiple 404 pages for every blog page.

I appreciate the help guys.  Screaming Frog, SEO Moz, and GWT definitely all helped on this one.

Thanks!

[evolvingSEO]

Marty

Did you both move to the subdomain and switch to Yoast at the same time. Or is the WordPress setup essentially the same, and all you did is switch to the subdomain?

If you were already using Yoast before the switch, have you changed settings, or did those stay the same too?

Are the crawl errors happening in the Moz tools? Google Webmaster Tools? Can you confirm by manually trying to visit the URLs?

Lastly, when you say "pages that do not exist to begin with" - do they still not exit? Are they at all similar to pages that do exist?

Sorry for all the questions, just trying to nail it down for you and also see if Ben has answered it.

-Dan

[blacey]

If you moved the site into a subdomain then all the links that used to point to the old blog (that wasn't on a subdomain) won't work.

You need to add a .htaccess file to the root of your website and put in redirects for broken links. Something like the following should work:

<code>Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/(.*)$ http://blog.example.com/$1</code>

This will basically redirect the old links for your blog to the subdomain, which will help Google know that the pages have moved. The whole point of 301 redirects (if you don't already know) is to ensure your pages retain their page rank if you change your site structure. Now its been said that you lose some page rank using a 301 redirect from the old location to the new location, but that's better than Google assuming the page has been removed from your site as this would mean Google will remove the site from its index and you can wave goodbye to that page's good search position.

I hope this helps, if you need me to clarify anything let me know.

Ben