We changed the URL structure 10 weeks ago and Google hasn't indexed it yet...
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We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago...
We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now).
On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference.
We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet.
Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker?
It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!
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Good Point. I'd suggest a canonical on the new pages as well as blasting them to the social media sites for a quicker turnaround.
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They already has 5000 404 pages. I don't mean block any existing pages which were changed.
I mean only block pages which always returned a 404
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I agree with Dave except I would not recommend blocking any pages with robots.txt. 301 redirect them all to their new pages.
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If you have a site with 5000 pages and you decide to change all the page URLs, you will still have a site with 5000 pages. The problem is that Google has no way of understanding how the old pages map to the new ones. You do.
You need to 301 your old pages to your new ones. This method is a win all around.
You lose zero traffic. You keep 90%+ of the link value, and your visitors can find the pages they are looking for.
Right now Google sees your new pages as duplicate content and wont list it.
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- Have you setup a Google Webmasters account?
- You should submit a sitemap to Webmasters. Info Here
- Also make sure all the 404 pages are blocked by robots.txt
- Add in a 301 redirect from all old content to the new content.
This link is about moving to a new domain but most of the steps still apply.
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