Check with your hosting provider. They should be able to tell you if your website is being accessed unnaturally.

Tested and all working!

Thanks for that.

All done now, fingers crossed!

Richard

Got one.

This is the content - not certain that's what I need?

redirect permanent /index.html http://www.global-lingo.com/index.php

BEGIN WordPress

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule>

END WordPress

That's what I want to do. But I can't be sure I have the right file. There are .htaccess files in a few folders

Thanks for bearing with me Matthew

Ok now I'm stuck again!

I have the list, in the right format, thanks to Matthew.

I can see where to upload the file, but now I'm worried that it will replace all my existing redirects. From the WordPress site I can't see where I can export all the existing redirects so that I could at least add my new ones to the existing ones and upload a new file.

Any ideas guys?

Brilliant, thanks Matthew

Hi Matthew,

Sorry, pretty nervous now!

Here's what I have in the columns

A = http://www.global-lingo.com/news/2009/12/news-internet-translations/

B = http://www.global-lingo.com/blog/

C = redirect 301 http://www.global-lingo.com/news/2009/12/news-internet-translations/ http://www.global-lingo.com/blog/

I think I got a little lost with the full URL in column A. What should I remove? Or have a got it correct? Sorry to use the real URL I just want to make sure I get this correct.

Thanks

Richard

Hi Matthew,

That is the perfect answer, thank you so much. Just creating the file was where I was getting stuck and knowing what to put in the columns.

what I have at the moment is:

Column A = 404 url

Column B = URL I want

That solution is perfect, I'm more than happy using that!

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the quick response. That's why I'm being very careful. I have used the re-direction tool but as there are quite a lot to do I was looking for some way to create one big file and then upload rather than copy and paste nearly 300 entries

Sorry to ask a really dumb question. I want to sort out a load of old 404 errors. I've exported the list of URL and I'm more than happy to go through that and work out what needs to go where.

After that my only option at the moment is to use the re-direct function in my WordPress install and do all the work manually. There are loads to do so I want to be able to upload all the re-directs.

I know I need to create a htaccess file and upload it. I know where to upload it.

This is where I get nervous. I need to get this file right. Is there a really obvious idiots file which I can use and then save as the correct file type? I've got all the URLs in a CSV at the moment.

Sorry for being a bit thick. Hope you can help.

Thanks for the great answers. My problem is that my home page http://www.global-lingo.com/ has no reference to Arabic Interpreting at all. My Arabic Interpreting page http://www.global-lingo.com/interpreting-services/arabic-language-interpreted according to SEOMoz's own tools is nearly perfectly optimised for the term I want to rank for. Unless I'm missing something really obvious.

I guess my best option is to build back links to the page in the vague hope that Google changes it's mind. As you can see from my site I'm trying to rank with targeted pages for a whole host of Translation and interpreting terms. Some work really well and other not so. Any advice would be appreciated.

My site ranks #1 for Arabic Interpreting on Google UK. This great, but it's ranking my home page rather than the my specific Arabic Interpreting page.

The home page shouldn't really rank for this term as it has very little connection with this exact term. This means that while the site ranks great, the conversion is pretty much zero.

How can I get Google to rank the page I've optimised for this term? I know the ranking will no doubt slip but may the conversions will be better.

Can you help please?

Thanks for the help guys. I think I've got a handle on the problem now.

Some of the pages are ranking for terms I have optimised other pages for. The pages which are ranking are quite rightly falling, because they aren't optimised for the terms they're showing for. However, I have pages which are optomised for those terms. How do I switch the SERPS to the page I want?

Very interesting. Looks like they should pass some link juice then. Thanks for the information.

Thanks for the quick answer. On twitter someone suggested that the pages are built client side with JS and search engines never see the links. Does this stack up?

My twitter feed is picked up in the daily roundups like Paper.li. Do these links count towards my SEO effort or are they just empty. Clearly they spread my content so that great, just wondered if the links pass juice to the site.