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Thank you Lesley.

This really helps a lot. I appreciate it very much. This is my site by the way: http://devilswink.com/

Thanks.

Nico.

Hello Moz Community,

My developer has added this to my robots.txt file: Disallow: /404/

Is this considered good practice in the world of SEO? Would you do it with your clients?

I feel he has great development knowledge but isn't too well versed in SEO.

Thank you in advanced,

Nico.

Thank you Everett. You don't know how much this helps me. I was dreading having to start the site from scratch, so I will continue with the one I have and work on it for as along as it takes. This is the site by the way: http://devilswink.com/

Do you offer SEO consulting services for small businesses in the U.S. Everret?

Hi Everett,

Thank you very much for your feedback.

This does put me at ease because I was ready to pull the plug and start a new site from scratch.

Quick question, do old Rewrites disappear after a while? In others words, do they keep getting crawled?

If so, can I deleted them after a few months for example, or after a year, or do search engines need them to exist permanently because other wise they would generate new 404s?

Thank you.

Nico.

Hello everyone,

I have over 480,000 internal rewrites in my Magento site. The reason I have so many is because I have over 1,500 products on my site and I update inventory every day via Bulk Import Extension. For the first few months I didn't realize that the URL was changing by a single digit every time I imported the .xml with new inventory counts. This of course created thousands and thousands of 404s.

I figured out how to avoid the digit change and then I started redirecting the 404s via a Bulk Rewrite Extension. I managed to rewrite over over 50,000 404s but new ones still pop up every day and there is no end to them in sight.

My traffic is terrible. Only about 40 organics daily. It's been like that for months. I can't get it off the ground and I think it's because of this excessive rewrite and 404 issue.

My question is, does having so many internal rewrites and 404s hurt my SEO efforts?

Would it be better just to start from scratch with a new site, new domain, new everything?

Please help me. I'm going crazy with this. Thank you.

Nico.

Hello Moz Community,

My developer has added this to my robots.txt file: Disallow: /404/

Is this considered good practice in the world of SEO? Would you do it with your clients?

I feel he has great development knowledge but isn't too well versed in SEO.

Thank you in advanced,

Nico.