I highly doubt this error would have anything to do with that. I would also recommending cross checking those rankings with another party tool like Authority Labs - or you can look for your average position in Google Webmaster Tools. Moz runs rankings once a week, and sometimes it might happen to pick up on a temporary fluctuation. So I'd confirm the ranking drop before deciding what to do next

Sounds like probably the same issue wcbuckner describes - if it's  problem in any way I would contact GoDaddy about it and see what they have to say.

Hi

As far as I know there is no way to do this in webmaster tools. You can test your robots.txt file with the Robots.txt Tester - but you need to actually update the real file to block URLs from being crawled.

At any rate, normally you would not block 404s from being crawled - Google with either stop crawling them on their own, or this way if they are indexed they can drop out of the index.

What do you mean by "submit links to Google Webmaster Tools"? As far as I know there isn't a way to submit 404 URLs in there.

The way to solve 404s are;

• make the URL a real page again (if it broke by accident)
• remove links pointing at the bad page
• 301 redirect the 404 page to one that works
• you can opt to leave it alone if there was nothing important on that page and there is no good page to redirect it to

404s might hurt rankings, but only in extreme cases where it was a popular page and now you're losing the back link value or referral traffic etc. I'd say in 90/100 cases 404s will not hurt your rankings.

Hey There

Google's webmaster documentation says;

"Generally, 404 errors don’t impact your site’s ranking in Google, and you can safely ignore them."

When Google says "generally" this tends to mean "in most cases" or "not directly" or "there may be secondary effects"... you get the idea.

But I think they are assuming you need to be smart enough to know if the 404 was intentional, and if not why it happened. For example - if you had a really popular piece of content with back links directly to that URL, and then the URL 404s - you supposed may lose the "link juice" pointing into that article. So in that regard 404s can hurt rankings secondarily.

But as other have said, you can redirect your 404s to a similar page (Google recommends not the homepage).

I am not sure why the Moz report puts them in "high priority" - perhaps they mean "high priority" from a general web best practice point of view, and not strictly SEO.

I'd try to get really specific on two things;

• "traffic" - are you saying only Google traffic? All traffic?

• if it IS google traffic, did you notice if Google has actually crawled and re-cached the new version on the website?

• also, does traffic decrease evenly across all pages on the site? or is it limited to just certain pages or sections?

• "changing themes" - are these theme changes only design / skin changes - or do they affect URLs, internal links, content (such as page titles/descriptions etc)

I think answering these questions really matters in terms of figuring out what happened. I think it's very unlikely for just a surface skin/design change to hurt traffic so much - there must be deeper things going on, and it's just a matter of figuring out what the specifics are.

What exactly is happening, the same 429 errors? Does wcbuckner's response explain it for you?

Hi There

It's a little tricky to diagnose without seeing the full context. But in general I'd say if the code is serving no purpose that you can tell - it doesn't show to the user ever (check all devices / screen sizes, all page types etc etc)... if it never displays for the user for any purpose, you can remove the code. I don't think the code is very bad though, in the grand scheme of things. I've seen far worse blatant links placed within themes and designs. This one doesn't seem malicious, although I'm not entire sure what it's for out of context.

The above answers are spot on. Have one H1 per page, and that H1 should be unique and reflect the main heading/title.

I just wanted to add this great article by Bill Slawski - he goes into really great depth about their best usage and importance: http://www.seobythesea.com/2012/01/heading-elements-and-the-folly-of-seo-expert-ranking-lists/