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Not long ago I wanted to change the permalink structure on a blog where the full date was included in the post urls to one where it was just /category/blog-post-title. The site is on a managed host and they setup the redirects for me and then I changed the permalink structure in the WP settings. Everything worked fine after and all old posts now redirect to the new structure.

However in Google search console I can see that my 404s report has jumped from a few hundred to several thousands but it seems to be counting the urls paths to elements such as images within the old posts permalink structure eg

/2012/6/some-post/some-image-in-post

all the old posts themselves and their content redirects fine though.

Do I need to worry about these 404s? It annoys me to see so many in my reports like that even if they aren't hurting my site

Ive done a lot of internal linking before but its always been for other inner pages but now I need to do it for a websites homepage but this got me thinking if its even worth doing and should I be doing it at all? For the first question I was thinking that surely the homepage has more authority than any of my inner pages so how would internal links from inner pages help and for the second question Ive read a few posts like this Kissmetrics one here where it says you shouldnt do it.

There are two types of links you should avoid using in your content:

Homepage. Most sites have too many links to the homepage as it is. You would rather strengthen internal pages to boost the overall SEO of your site, rather than simply point more links at the homepage.

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/commandments-of-internal-linking/

thoughts?

Hi Craig,

All the old content is still on the sub-domain, none of this content is on the new domain though so there shouldnt be duplicate content issues.

Im not sure tbh, probably leaving the old sub domain as is, already I redirect the sign-up/submisisons page to the new domain so new content will go there.

I should add that the sub-domain is hosted on a different server.

I had forgotten about this thread actually and just done a quick check and it seems that all but 1-2 recent postings are indexed now so Im guessing it was just taking some time for Google to crawl the site properly?

..and actually just done another check and it seems that 5/6 of the most recent listings are all indexed fine and this is without me doing anything, I have no idea why one of them isnt though, nothing is different on that page plus its the oldest out of the 6 and all of them are featured and linked to from the homepage so page rank should be flowing directly to them...

Hi Michael,

Sorry for the delayed response, no the inner pages arent setup to be nofollowed or no indexed, they all have canonicals pointing back to themself which I think is correct right?

I have a business directory site thats been around a long time but has always been split into two parts, a subdomain and the main domain. The subdomain has been used for listings for years but just recently Ive opened up the main domain and started adding listings there.

The problem is that none of the listing pages seem to be betting indexed in Google. The main domain is indexed as is the category page and all its pages below that eg /category/travel but the actual business listing pages below that will not index. I can however get them to index if I request Google to crawl them in search console.

A few other things:

I have nothing blocked in the robots.txt file

The site has a DA over 50 and a decent amount of backlinks

There is a sitemap setup also

any ideas?

OK will try that thanks

thanks, I have planned to do that, there's so many of them though

I have a website that Im currently working on that has been fairly dormant for a while and has just been given a face lift and brought back to life. I have some questions below about dealing with 404 pages.

In Google WMT/search console there are reports of thousands of 404 pages going back some years. It says there are over 5k in total but I am only able to download 1k or so from WMT it seems.

I ran a crawl test with Moz and the report it sent back only had a few hundred 404s in, why is that?

Im not sure what to do with all the 404 pages also, I know that both Google and Moz recommend a mixture of leaving some as 404s and redirect others and Id like to know what the community here suggests.

The 404s are a mix of the following:

Blog posts and articles that have disappeared (some of these have good back-links too)

Urls that look like they used to belong to users (the site used to have a forum) which where deleted when the forum was removed, some of them look like they were removed for spam reasons too eg /user/buy-cheap-meds-online and others like that

Other urls like this /node/4455 (or some other random number)

Im thinking I should permanently redirect the blog posts to the homepage or the blog but Im not sure what to do about all the others? Surely having so many 404s like this is hurting my crawl rate?

So my understanding is that you can use site: [page url without http] to check if a page is indexed by Google, is this 100% reliable though?

Just recently Ive worked on a few pages that have not shown up when Ive checked them using site: but they do show up when using info: and also show their cached versions, also the rest of the site and pages above it (the url I was checking was quite deep) are indexed just fine.

What does this mean?

thank you

p.s I do not have WMT or GA access for these sites