404's and a drop in Rank - Site maps? Data Highlighter?
-
I managed an old (2006 design) ticket site that was hosted and run by the same company that handled our point of sale. (Think, really crappy, customer had to click through three pages to get to the tickets, etc.) In Mid February, we migrated that old site to a new, more powerful site, built by a company that handles sites exclusively for ticket brokers. (My site: TheTicketKing. - dot - com)
Before migration, I set up 301's for all the pages that we had currently ranked for, and had inbound links pointing to, etc. The CMS allowed me to set every one of those landing pages up with fresh content, so I created unique content for all of them, ran them through the Moz grader before launch, etc. We launched the site in Mid February, and it seemed like Google responded well. All the pages that we had 301's set up for stayed up fairly well in rank, and some even reached higher positions, while some took a few weeks to get back up to where they were before. Google was also giving us an average of 8-10K impressions per day, compared to 3000 per day with the old site. I started to notice a slow drop in impressions in mid April (after two months of love from Google,) and we lost rank on all our non branded pages around 4/23. Our branded terms are still fine, we didn't get a message from Google, and I reached out to the company that manages our site, asking if they had any issues with their other clients. They suggested that I resubmit our sitemaps. I did, and saw everything bump back up (impressions and rank) for just one week. Now we're back in the basement with all the non branded terms once again. I realize that Google could have penalized us without giving us a message, but what got me somewhat optimistic was the fact that resubmitting our sitemaps did bring us back up for around a week.
One other thing that I was working on with the site just before the drop was Google's data highlighter. I submitted a set of pages that now come back with errors, after Google seemed to be fine with the data set before I submitted it. So now I'm looking at over 300 data highlighter errors when I'm in WMT. I deleted that set, but I still get the error listings in WMT, as if Google is still trying to understand those pages. Would that have an effect on our rank? Finally I do see that our 404's have risen steadily since the migration, to over 1000 now, and the people who manage the CMS tell me that it would have no effect on rank overall. And we're going to continue to get 404's as the nature of a ticket site would dictate? (Not sure on that, but that's what I was told.) Would anyone care to chime in on these thoughts, or any other clues as to my drop?
-
No, we stayed with .aspx. I was also told that we received a call from "Google" coming into our main telephone number, and it was an automated call that asked about changes to the site, and if we would like to speak to a live person. By the time the call was transferred, we lost the call. (twice.) That could have been someone from Adwords, as I was also reaching out to them about some other things. The weird part about the call was that the receptionist swears that she heard "We're calling to confirm changes to your site." before she tried to transfer the call to my office. I have never heard of Google calling regarding WMT, or site changes.
-
In your experience, once Google did manage to "unindex" the old pages, did that result in more positive ranking?
-
Did the language of your website change, meaning did you move from .aspx to .php or .html? If so we have experienced a similar situation where thousands of old pages were indexed by Google, once the site was moved to a new language we were penalized until we redirected all of the old pages.
-
I'm assuming you changed the name of all the urls' to some degree? If you kept the structure of the site and the name of the pages the same, I don't think you'd see this happening. If you did restructure and rename, you may have triggered an automatic algo penalty. I would check the external link profile to see what keywords are linking back to you. If the new urls are different from the old, that may have been the cause of the drop. 404's are always a concern, especially with old sites since there could be hundreds of pages that you may have thought were dormant, but Google keeps visiting. Even though these pages may not be linked anywhere, Google has them indexed and is still visiting. Same goes with images! They may be missing on the new server. But from what I understand, such 404's will correct themselves over time, as Google will un-index them.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is it against google guidelines to use third party review sites as well as have reviews on my site marked up with schema?
So, i look after a site for my family business. We have teamed up with the third party site TrustPilot because we like the way it enables us to send out reviews to our customers directly from our system. It's been going great and some of the reviews have been brilliant. I have used a couple of these reviews on our site and marked them up with: REVIEW CONTENT We work in the service industry and so one of the problems we have found is that getting our customers to actually go online and leave a review. They normally just leave their comments on a job sheet that the workers have signed when they leave. So I have created a page on our site where we post some of the reviews the guys receive too. I have used the following: REVIEW TITLE REVIEW Written by: CUSTOMER NAME Type of Service:House Removal Date published: DATE PUBLISHED 10 / 10 stars I was just wondering I was told that this could be against googles guidelines and as i've seen a bit of a drop in our rankings in the last week or so i'm a little concerned. Is this getting me penalised? Should I not use my reviews referencing the ones on trust pilot and should i not have my own reviews page with rich snippets?
Web Design | | BearPaw881 -
Large Global Site Structure
Hi, I have a question about the advised structure for a website that I'm currently building. It's a large international brand with it's main office in the UK. The main website is the .com but there is a growing international franchisee network. I've built the .com site on Wordpress but I'm not sure if I the best way forward would be to create each international website on a separate hosted site or just include it in the .com Wordpress structure using the The WordPress Multilingual Plugin. So to sum up... should I build the entire global network on one domain and then use WPML plugin or should I build separate websites for each International franchisee? Hope some one can educate me on the best route to take. Thanks Moz Community
Web Design | | SeoSheikh0 -
URL Re-Mapping Question ?. Do I need to the theme of my business in my url struture even though GWT knows what my site is about
Hi All, I have currently planning to do some url remapping on my Hire Website as alot of most important pages are far to many levels deep from the root domain. This is also making my sitemap not tidy etc. In GWT, Google knows that the theme is my website is Hire as it's the top word. Therefore do I still need to use the word hire in all my new url categories / structures or not ? Examples http://goo.gl/BFmvk2 I was thinking of remapping to www.xxxxxxx.xco.uk/tool-hire-birmingham http://goo.gl/pC9Bdp I was thinking of remapping to www.xxxxxx.co.uk/cleaning-equipment Notice in the later example , I do not have the word rent in the url. Any advice is much appreciated thanks peter
Web Design | | PeteC120 -
Avoiding duplicate content with multi-lagusage site
Hi, We have a client in China that is looking to create three versions of the same website, English, Chinese and Korean. They do not want to use a translation plugin like Google translate, preferring to have the pages duplicated. What is the best way to do this bearing in mind that the site needs to be found in all three languages. Would also appreciate if anyone knows of a good hosting company that has English support on the Chinese main land. Thanks Fraser
Web Design | | fraserhannah0 -
404 page not found after site migration
Hi, A question from our developer. We have an issue in Google Webmaster Tools. A few months ago we killed off one of our e-commerce sites and set up another to replace it. The new site uses different software on a different domain. I set up a mass 301 redirect that would redirect any URLs to the new domain, so domain-one.com/product would redirect to domain-two.com/product. As it turns out, the new site doesn’t use the same URLs for products as the old one did, so I deleted the mass 301 redirect. We’re getting a lot of URLs showing up as 404 not found in Webmaster tools. These URLs used to exist on the old site and be linked to from the old sitemap. Even URLs that are showing up as 404 recently say that they are linked to in the old sitemap. The old sitemap no longer exists and has been returning a 404 error for some time now. Normally I would set up 301 redirects for each one and mark them as fixed, but there are almost quarter of a million URLs that are returning 404 errors, and rising. I’m sure there are some genuine problems that need sorting out in that list, but I just can’t see them under the mass of errors for pages that have been redirected from the old site. Because of this, I’m reluctant to set up a robots file that disallows all of the 404 URLs. The old site is no longer in the index. Searching google for site:domain-one.com returns no results. Ideally, I’d like anything that was linked from the old sitemap to be removed from webmaster tools and for Google to stop attempting to crawl those pages. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | PASSLtd0 -
Will upgrading my dedicated server improve my site speed
hi, at the moment i am concerned about my site speed for www.in2town.co.uk My hosting company is tmd hosting and my package is Intel Atom 330 1MB L2 Cache 1.6GH $159/mo $189/month500GBStorage4GBRAM10TBBandwidthi am looking at increasing this to**$219/mo** $289/month500GBStorage6GBRAM10TBBandwidthcan anyone let me know if this will make a difference to my site speed please
Web Design | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Does changing nameservers and a new site design affect SEO dramatically
We are about to change nameservers and upload a new website design design, completely rebuilt website to that new hosting, will this effect our seo efforts previously and have an effect on our SEO rankings?
Web Design | | CompleteOffice0 -
Examples of e-commerce sites using ajax faceted navigation?
Does anyone have examples of e-commerce sites successfully using ajax to power faceted navigation?
Web Design | | ao.com0