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Hi all,

The problem:Google pointed out to me that I have a large increase of 404 errors. In short I had software before that created pages (automated) for long tale search terms and feeded them to google. Recently I quit this service and all those pages (about 500000) were deleted. Now google GWM points out about 800000 404 errors.

What I noticed: I had a large amount of 404's before when I changed my website. I fixed it (proper 302) and as soon as all the 404's in GWM were gone I had around 200 visitors a day more.

It seems that a clean site is better positioned.

Anybody any suggestion on how to tell google that all urls starting with www.domain/webdir/  should be deleted from cache?

I do have 3 different sub directories on the main domain. /NL, /DE and /EN, one for each language.

So I should add a GWT 'site' for each language and set a target geographic location to the righ region and delete the hometextileshop.com GWT 'site'(that is the main domain for 3 languages)

That would mean remove the sitemap too since it has 3 languages in it too.

As for the sitemap: would it be better in my case to remove the sitemap all to gether and let the bots just crawl the site and index?

Or should I have the sitemap module reprogrammed to use the "alternative" tag.

And how would the sitemap be applied if I had 3 GWT sites (one for each language)

For each language a sitemap with the target language and the other 2 as 'alternative', or just one sitemap for all 3 GWT-sites with 1 main language and the other languages as "alternative'?

Hi Marek,

Your comment on the rel="alternative" got me thinking.

I run a prestashop in 3 languages and use a sitemap module, and it doesn't use the alternative tag

( www.hometextileshop.com/sitemap.xml)

I always had trouble to rank in more than one language, the standard language in the shop seems to affect the language priority and since I use a multi langual sitemap I see english sites rank on dutch keywords (although the standard language is dutch), the dutch keyword is not even on these sites.

Somehow the multi language part of the site brings trouble and search engines seen to have trouble with it althoug each site is differtent in each language. (one url per language, own title and description and (translated) content)

Any suggestions?

I noticed the same thing on my websites. (all of them)

What stood out was that alle the keywords that have more competition and had more linkbuilding over the past year dropped more than keywords with no linkbuilding on it.

Around met I heard more people telling me that their sales in their shop have dropped since middle of this week.

The key question is what to do about this? How to get ranking up again.

If there was a google update it did not seem to effect my competition. The people mentioned above  all have websites around the same size as mine. Maybe that's got something to do with it (guess)

Please ask any question that arises, I'll be glad to answer if that leads to a solution to this.