Hi all, I run a blog with around 1,500 content items, all nicely packed into around 30 categories etc. I use Joomla! as my CMS, and a third party addon to provide SEF URLs. It turns URLs of the format; site.com/content.php?section=blah?id=fred into; site.com/blah/fred.html The other day I was clicking wildly in the admin backend, and rebuilt the SEF URLs (all 1,500 of them), as the script recommended I do (hmm). It basically rebuilt them all to remove trailing numbers, or to reflect changes I had made to content titles. Probably around 500 URL's changed instantly. The upshot of this is Google now gets a LOT of 404's from my site. Webmaster Central reports 610 "404 not found" pages, and the traffic they used to send me has gone from 300/day to around 10/day. Interestingly I now get a lot more from images.google.com. Probably because they weren't renamed! Has anyone ever experienced this? Or know of a quick way to get the thing re-indexed with the new URL's? I don't have option to 301 them all, and suspect it's too late for that anyway... Let's just say I won't be clicking that button again! Thanks all, kma
Hi there Yeah i moved a forum quite recently and i had 9000 404 errors, i did lose some traffic and the errors did show up in webmaster tools, just leave those pages they will slowly be dropped by google u will see that 600 number go down slowly, it will find ur new urls just might take a bit of time, hopefully u will get ur traffic back then. I dont think there is quick way around it to be honest. Woc
Your just going to have to wait this one out - I would allow around 6 months for google to fully re-index your content as it may see the new url's as duplicate content of the old url's.
Not great news, but it's pretty much what I expected. For anyone who stumbles across this thread in future, 3 weeks after rebuilding the URLs I'm still looking at 619 #404's in webmaster tools(!). Thanks for taking the time to reply guys. kma