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Hey there!

The 404s are from Webmaster tools. It's the sitemap xml files that are missing. But Google is still looking for them. So if Google looks for the non-existant xmls, is this a big deal, or should I just ignore it since the new sitemap is already in WMT and there's no problem with crawling/indexing the site.

Thanks bud.

I've discovered a ton of 404s from Google's WMT crawler looking for mydomain.com/sitemap_archive_MONTH_YEAR. There are tons of these monthly archive xmls. I've used a plugin that for some reason created individual monthly archive xml sitemaps and now I get 404s. Creating rules for each archive seems a bad solution. My current sitemap plugin creates a single clean one mydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml.

How can I create a redirect rule in the Redirection WP plugin that will redirect any URL that has the 'sitemap' and 'xml' string in it to my current xml sitemap?

I've tried using a wildcard like so: mysite.com/sitemap*.*, mysite.com/sitemap ., mysite.com/sitemap(.), mysite.com/sitemap (.) but none of the wildcard uses got the general redirect to work. Is there a way to make this happen with the WP Redirection plugin? If not, is there a htaccess rule, and what would the code be for it? Im not very fluent with using general redirects in htaccess unfortunately. Thanks!

Sounds a plan. Thanks for your help bud, much appreciated.

Hi. I did go through GA several years back, think back to 2011, but didn't really see dramatic changes in traffic other than a general trend of just low organic traffic throughout. Keep in mind that it's an engineering site, so no thousands of visit per day... the keywords that are important for the site get below 1000 searcher per month (data from the days when Google Keyword Tool shared this info with us mortals).

That said, I do notice in roughly 60% of the links absolutely no regard for anchors, so some are www.domain.com/index.php, Company Name, some are Visit Site, some are Website etc. Some anchors are entire generic sentences like "your company provided great service, your entire team should be commended blah blah blah". And there are tons of backlinks from http://jennifers.tempdomainname.com...a domain that a weird animal as there's not much data on who they are, what they do and what the deal is with the domain name itself. Weird.

In all honesty, nothing in WMT or GA suggests that the site got hit by either Penguin or Panda....BUT, having a ton of links that originate from non-existing pages, pages with no thematic proximity to the client site, anchors that are as generic as "Great Service"...is it a plus to err on the side of caution and get them disavowed, or wait for a reason from Google and then do the link hygiene?

Thanks for your response. Im about done with cleaning up the link list in very broad strokes, eliminating obvious poor quality links, so in a few hours I could have a big list for disavowing.

The site is very specific, mechanical engineering thing and they sell technology and consulting to GM, GE, Intel, Nasa... so backlinks from sites for rental properties and resorts do look shady....even if they do return a 200 status.

But...how vigilent is google now with all the Penguin updates about backlinks from non-related sites, and my client's site has tons of them? And if Majestic reports them to have zero trust flow, is there a benefit of having them at all?

Thanks.

Hi. Thanks for responding. WMT shows just a fraction of the links actually. about few thousand for the site that Majestic Historic reports 48k. But I dont have any notifications of issues. Im guessing that with all the Penguin updates most sites won't get any notifications and it's up to us SEO guys to figure out why rankings are so low.

About quality of the links, many do come from weird sites, and I've noticed ezinearticles too. Problem is that the 48k portfolio was built by non-seo experts and now, few years after the fact, Im stuck with a site that doesn't rank well and has no notifications in WMT. But can I take the lack of notification as evidence that the site has no backlinks problem, or do I read-in the problem in poor organic ranking?

Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist.

There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file?

Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not?

Hope Im making sense