Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Awesome! Thank you so much for your help. You rock!

Actually - one quick question. Should I do anything in webmaster tools - mark them as fixed? Or remove the links manually? Or should I just leave the crawl errors there since they are 404s?

This I can do! Thank you for your help.

Maybe Ken? Another company had built and hosted the site for the company (my first project coming on board a few months ago was a new website that we'd manage in-house).

So, the odd thing based on what you were saying is that the links are being show to be coming from was: http://batesmillstore.com/shop/cable-weave-throw (which had been returning a 404 before but is not properly mapped to the right product on the new website).

Thoughts?

Sure:

http://www.batesmillstore.com/winston-ultra-lights

http://www.batesmillstore.com/buy-cigarettes-online-new-york

http://www.batesmillstore.com/delaware-cigarettes-price

Hi there,

I'm noticing a bunch of URLs showing up in my google webmaster tools that are all cigarette related (they are appearing as 404s in the crawl error report). They are throwing 404 errors which is why they are listed here...

Anyone have any idea of what this could be? I recently switched from Wordpress to Shopify and these weird URLs just started appearing on my webmaster tools in the last week. Kinda bizarre / a little alarming!

Thanks,
Bianca

Ah - okay, I'll see if I can do that. I'm not sure if I can though because of the way the ecommerce platform is setup.

Yes, the sitemap has been corrected and has all non-https URLs in there.

I mean, will google eventually "catch up" or is this a big issue that I should try everything in my power to fix? (It's not all links coming in via organic - just a handful but it's important as those are great leads).

Thanks for your help!

Hi there,

I recently switch my site to a new ecommerce platform which hosts the SSL certificate on their end so my site no longer has the HTTPS status unless a user is going through the checkout.

Google has cached the HTTPS version of the site so in search it comes up sometimes which leads to a nasty warning that the site may not be what they are looking for. Is there a way to tell google NOT to look at the https version of the site anymore?

Thanks!

Bianca

Thanks for the response! Unfortunately, the integrated Squarespace solution that you mention doesn't work for me because the content was hosted on another site according to their customer service. Not sure if this may make you suggest anything out of the box? Thanks again for your help. It's appreciated!

I just moved my site from a Wordpress hosted site to Squarespace. We have the same domain, however, the content is now located on a different URL (again, same base domain).

I'm unable to easily set up 301 redirects for the old content to be mapped to the new content so I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for a workaround. Basically, I want to make sure google knows that Product A's page is now located at this new URL. (www.domain.com/11245 > www.domain.com/product-a).

Maybe it's something that I don't have to worry about anymore because the old content is gone? I mean, I have a global redirect set up that no matter what you enter after the base domain, it now goes to the homepage but I just want to make sure I'm not missing something here.

Really appreciate your help!

If only it were that easy! Both brands are strong in their individual respects. One has been around for 60+ years while the other has been around for 10+ years with a name connecting the two that has been around for 150+ years. The history and what's been built on that history forces us to keep both - real world meets the web!

I'm in the process of launching two new websites (redesign / rebrand) - one website represents the manufacturer while a second website represents the retail side of the manufacturer (same company essentially but two different brands).

The sites have co-existed historically without worry of canibalizing the other's traffic, but I want to make sure in this redesign that we're all set. I'm curious if anyone has any recommendations on how to handle two sites with different branding but VERY similar content (product descriptions are essentially the same). I was thinking it could be smart to just no follow the content on the manufacturers site since we're just trying to drive traffic to the consumer-facing retail side mostly anyway but would love to hear from the experts!

Thank you.

This is super helpful! Thanks Jeff. And just out of curiosity, is it guaranteed that things will slow down on the SEO front or if we cover all our bases, is it possible we won't see a dip?

Hi there,

I'm in the process of building a new site using Shopify for our e-commerce site. We are currently using a WordPress site (www.batesmillstore.com) that was built by third party developers. I am concerned that we could see a drop in our organic traffic once we make the transition from the WordPress site to our Shopify site.

Does anyone have any recommendations or a checklist we could use to make sure we're doing this properly and so that it is as smooth of a transition as possible?

Thanks,
Bianca