Tons of 404 errors - wordpress permalink structure

[lsat]

hi all,

noticed my crawl report is showing a ton of 404 errors.  my site is running on wordpress, and i believe this is related to a change in my permalink structure (all of the pages do exist, but the url is slightly different).

how does the crawl report find these 404s?  When navigating around my site, the correct pages are accessible, but the report is seeing the old URL structure for some reason.  Do these live in the sitemap?  How can this be corrected?

thanks so much for your help!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Download Screaming Frog spider and crawl your website. That should help you find if/where you reference 404 pages.

Cheers

[GuestBlogPoster.com]

Good luck!

[lsat]

thanks guys.  i am currently using the redirection plugin for a few URLs that changed a while back.  The report is showing like 100 404s, so adding them all would be a bit of a nightmare (these are all stemming from blog posts).  I'll have a look at the sitemap & GWT to see if there's anything that can be corrected there, and look around the site to see if there's anything weird going on.  thanks again!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

I've run into the same problem a few times. Change link structure > update all link references EVERYWHERE > double check to make sure no old link references exist > remove the 404 errors from GWT > they come back a week later citing the link on pages that DO NOT have the link =/ Very frustrating since I like seeing a nice 0 in the errors section.

The only way to fix it (from my experience) is to set up 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones.That way there is no 404 code and G will pick up that the old 404 page is actually a new, existing page.

Good luck!

[GuestBlogPoster.com]

Could live in the sitemap but also incoming links that were using that old URL structure. With recent versions of WP, I think when you change the permalink structure it should automatically place 301 redirects in place...

I would try downloading the "redirection" plugin. Pretty simple and straight forward. You're also going to want to rebuild your sitemap and submit it through Google Webmaster Tools.

Does that answer your questions or would you like to provide your URL so I can look closer?

Kevin Phelps
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinwphelps