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Thank you for your words and interest in our website. We tend to focus on latest in engineering, technology (gadgets too) for our blog. Our aim is to simplify the latest in engineering & technology for people who're interested in being up to date with technical stuff.

Do you have any suggestions on setting up 301s as Rand suggested (I've stated my requirements towards the bottom of this thread.

Well, makes sense. So leaving the 404s are they are, is more suicidal than 301'in them to relevant category pages? In our case, we only have one category called 'VoiCE' that gets all the news articles (from where the tags were deleted). So I'd be redirecting the tags to www.crazyengineers.com/category/voice/ .

But would it not be better to redirect them to homepage?

Also - is there any way to setup a 301 redirect for only the deleted 'tag' pages? I'd like to keep the 404 pages for other locations that are not existent. I'd really appreciate inputs on setting up 301s. Can't afford to go wrong.

I want www.crazyengineers.com/tag/ <deleted tag="">to 301 to http://www.crazyengineers.com or maybe the category.</deleted>

Rand - a simple question: There are about 20k tags that are removed. It's impossible to fix each one of them manually. Would you recommend redirecting each of the deleted tags to homepage (via 301)? Wouldn't that be disastrous to SEO?

Well, yes and I want to know what's the best way to fix these errors. I checked my backups and I don't have any way to restore those tags and associate them to relevant posts. I've received mixed responses about adding 301 redirects to the deleted tags - some say I should 301 all the deleted tag pages to homepage and some say it'd be a SEO suicide.

I believe the deleted tags were not helping much. They were the 'descriptive keywords' associated with posts and most of them were used just once.

What's your suggestion?

Hello Rand,

First of all - I must mention that you're super-awesome and I'm a big fans of yours. I really appreciate your help.

Allow me to summarize: I deleted about 20-25k tags from wordpress (www.crazyengineers.com) which were added by our authors over a period of time (1.5 years). Each removed tag resulted into 404 error.

GWT reported large number of 404 errors on the site and at the same time (around 5th September), traffic from Google started declining. The to the overall site is down and it's quite noticeable on /community/ (where our forums reside). Over 70% of our traffic is from Google and our overall traffic (visits) are down by about 50%. I noticed that the keywords that used to rank high have slipped by 5-6 positions and some even got pushed to page 2.

Please let me know if this information is sufficient. I'll be happy to provide more information. I think my situation is similar to the following discussion -> http://www.seomoz.org/q/seek-help-correcting-large-number-of-404-errors-generated-95-traffic-halt

Hello Rand, I've been facing a similar problem with my site. I'd really appreciate your response here - http://www.seomoz.org/q/help-fixing-the-traffic-drop-that-started-on-4-september-2012.

Okay, so I'm quite sure that it's the large number of 404s causing the drop. I've arrived at the conclusion after reading several threads on SEOmoz. This thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/seek-help-correcting-large-number-of-404-errors-generated-95-traffic-halt is quite closer to the problem we're facing.

Now, the big question :-

1. GWT reports ~90k "Page Not Found 404" errors and our traffic is down by almost 50%.

2. The 404 pages are all generated via the 'wordpress tags' I removed in bulk (almost 25k of them).

Should I go and 301/302 them or just let Google decide the fate of those pages on its own? If I just let Google do that; it might take 3-4 months for Google to do that.

Any possibility of having Rand to answer this question for me?

Hello Robert,

I apologies if my response looked like I'm defending the changes. I'm not defending the changes because my intension is to learn and fix the issues our site is experiencing. I really appreciate your responses, but want to make sure that the situation is properly understood so everyone's on the same page.

The traffic to the community is not from the homepage or the blog. The community forums draw their own traffic and the discussions were ranked high in Google searches.

The questions on my mind are -

1. Is it possible that the large number of errors on blog might have caused the community rankings go down? (The GWT notice and traffic drop to community were almost around the same time)

2. Is it the sidebar in the community that's responsible?

3. Is it the page layout algorithm that's affecting community rankings?

Hello Robert,

First of all, thanks a lot for such a detailed response. Allow me to post my comments -

1. The list of changes I made is limited to what I mentioned in the first post. I never messed around with meta description, or link building or anything for the sake of 'SEO'. So that's not what I'd look at.

2. Most important point: The traffic to blog is almost normal (just down about 10%, but it bounces any-time we publish a breaking news).

3. It's the traffic to our community: http://www.crazyengineers.com/community/  that's getting affected. The sidebar was introduced on all the /community/ pages; the blog has remained intact, except for the bulk removal of tags.

So, I'm wondering whether it's the 'tag' removal from blog that's affecting the 'community' or something else? If it's the page layout, then I've already removed the ads; and now have only 1 ad-unit above the fold on community pages, and one below the fold. This is no doubt, acceptable.

1. I've removed the tag cloud.

2. We're Google News blog and the posts aren't 'promotions'. Those are latest 'news' articles from the gadget world. We're a Google News accepted technology blog that frequently breaks stories.

3. Buy advertising is a common link on most of the blogs and that does not indicate we are all about 'advertising'.

4. I checked the traffic and it seems like the keywords aren't generating the traffic they used to. Now that does not tell me anything - it could be because the site went down in rankings and keywords aren't getting listed or the traffic to keywords shaded.

I look forward to responses from other members.

Hello Dana,

Thank you for your response. I'm of course not offended and I'm willing to learn & improve.

1. I can get rid of the tag cloud - but is it a big deal? The cloud only lists the most frequently used tags.

2. Could you please point me to the page/section that looks like a collection of advertisements? I think we're very reasonable in putting up advertisements.

3. How do I check rankings for specific keywords?

I'm happy to be a part of this wonderful community here and request help analysing my situation and would appreciate suggestions to fix the issues I'm facing.

First, The Website Setup -

We've a WordPress powered technology blog on main domain - http://www.crazyengineers.com & community forum on /community/ In the last 60 days, I've made following changes to the site that might have gone against us.

1. I added a sidebar to all the pages of our community forums to offer more useful information to the users, like recent threads, our latest exclusive interviews etc.

2. I added a descriptive welcome notice on all the pages of community at the top.

3. I added two ad-spots above the fold, didn't hurt user experience (IMHO).

4. I removed a LARGE number of unwanted tags from our WordPress blog that  offered no value to visitors; resulting into Google Webmaster Tools reporting a large number of 404 - Page Not Found errors.

Point To Note: Since September 4, I've been noticing significant drop in our traffic to the 'community' forums. The traffic is down almost 40-50%. Corrective Measures I've Taken -

1. Made sure that all the removed tags show proper 404 HTTP status. I added a search box to the 404 pages so that users have opportunity to find what they're looking for.

2. Removed the two ad-spots and placed only one 728x90 leaderboard above the fold.

3. We never engaged in any black-hat SEO techniques, link-building or content-copying. I double checked whether there are any suspicious activities reported in GWT but haven't spotted any.

I'd really appreciate analysis of what might have really gone wrong and the direction in which I should proceed to recover our traffic.