What kind of impact does a 404 have in a sitemap regarding ranking?
-
We recently had a site update where our robots file disallowed our sitemap for about two weeks. When we found the problem and resubmitted the sitemap to Google Search Console, it found a 404 error. Does this have any impact on ranking or visibility if we are still recovering from the disallow?
-
We ended up discovering that Google was very slow to update the console. Where other crawlers will crawl on demand and provide results in a couple of hours, in comparison, Google is about 3-4 days behind. We also heard that they have been having issues with the crawler lately which is what led to them temporarily disabling the "Request Indexing" button. So we look at Google now but only as a delayed reference after having used other tools like Moz and Screaming Frog. We found all of our answers using these other tools. We just wait patiently to know that eventually we are in Google's good graces.
-
Initially, it is a problem for google if you have uploaded the sitemap,xml to the search console. Have you noticed in this time if your visibility is low because of the errors found in the sitemap?
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
-
Lost Wikipedia page and dropped heavily in rankings. How many of you aware of and experienced this?
Hi all, We lost of our Wikipedia page for 2nd time and we dropped in rankings 2nd time too. I got confused first time whether Wikipedia was the actual reason as we had couple of major changes in our website. But recently it's been clear that losing Wikipedia page is the culprit as we have no website changes around these days. How many of you aware of this and experienced this? Please share your views. Hope this info will help you. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Ranking drop Feb 2013?
I'm trying to get to the bottom of why Directholidays.co.uk suffered a drop in rankings for the term "cheap holidays" in February 2013. Im looking at this recently and as an outsider so I haven't got access to Webmaster tools and I haven't been tracking rankings/link profiling. They moved from 2nd to 10th temporarily and then recovered at 7th the new 10th! I've looked at keywords improved/declined on, keywords lost/gained, traffic, traffic price but im failing to see exactly what I can use to show whether Panda #24 (officially 22nd of January) had a significant effect. Can anyone shed any light on this? It would be massively appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | eolithicproductions0 -
18 years later, Page Rank 6 Drops to 0, All +1s disappear, Scrapers outrank us
18 years ago I put up our first website at http://oz.vc/6 Traffic grew and our forums reached hundreds of thousands of posts, our website had a page rank of 6 and our forums and other content areas ranked 5-6, the others usually 4-6. Panda 2.2 came along and whacked it. No measures recommended by SEO experts and the Matt Cutts videos even made a dent, including some pretty severe measures that were supposed to make a difference. Bing and Yahoo traffic both grew since Panda 2.2 and only Google kept dropping every few updates without recovery. Several few weeks ago Google provides the ultimate whack. It seems every page other than the home page has either a PR of 0 or not generating any PR at all. Every +1 disappeared off of the site. Now three pages have +1 back and the entire guide section (hundreds of articles) are still missing all +1s. I discovered two scrapers, one of which was copying all of our forum posts and ranking a PR 2 for it (while we have a zero. They were taken down but I still can't imagine how this result could happen. I am going to have an RSS feed aggregator taken down that is ranking a 2 and knows we can't prevent them from taking our Wordress feeds and storing them (we use them for areas on the site.) How can Google provide us with a zero page rank and give obvious scrapers page rank? What should have been years worth of awesome rich added content and new features was wasted chasing Google ghosts. I've had two SEO people look at the site and none could point to any major issue that would explain what we've seen, especially the latest page rank death penalty. We haven't sold paid links. We have received no warnings from Google (nor should we have.) The large "thin" area you may see in a directory were removed entirely from Google (and made no difference and a drop in Google doing the "right" thing!) Most think we have been stuck for a very long time in the rare Google glitch. Would be interested in your insights.
Algorithm Updates | | seoagnostic0 -
Is my page footer the reason keyword rankings have dropped?
Hi all, One of my sites http://henstuff.com/ has seen some ranking drops for major keywords over the past few weeks and I was wondering if it was something to do with Penguin not taking a positive view of link-filled footers. It is something we are looking at phasing out but wanted to get the opinions of the SEOMOZ community. Thanks! Rob
Algorithm Updates | | RobertHill0 -
Google Places Rank Replacement
Hi Guys We have recentley done work for a client where they ended up position 1 for their chosen keyword, which was great. Since then there rank has changed and they are now first in google places rank but not on organic search at all, where as before they were on both? Any suggestions on why this may have happened? Not to sure at why google would have replaced the organic rank with the places rank? Cheers Chris
Algorithm Updates | | MiracleCreative0 -
How much posting product links to Social Media affect your ranking? Any use ?
Google has Google Plus. Facebook has partnership with Bing. How much social media affect your ranking ?
Algorithm Updates | | rahijain0 -
Higher rank created a quick boost but it didn't last..
I made a few changes to my website which bumped it up to 3rd place for the main keyword and brought it up to the first page for some of the other keywords. I saw a spike in traffic and conversions for 2 days, but now it went down significantly again. How can I research the cause of this?
Algorithm Updates | | Mariannag72820