Okay, I just redesigned a web site, and recreated some new pages and deleted many others. After going through this process, I realize that there were much better ways to go about redirecting, etc, however it's all said and done. When I check my google webmaster tools, there are 24 documented errors in the site map (all fixed and updated - the owner of the site uploaded an old sitemap without me knowing it). Then there are 56 "Not Found" errors. Most of which are the old links, the only sites linking to those were the links themselves before I cleared them from the system. It took some time because of the way she had the files saved. Yahoo hosts her site and does not support .htaccess (or whatever the redirect code is), so I set up a e404.html file which is what Yahoo recommends for their site. Anywho, I wasn't concerned about the Not Founds seeing as they were all broken links, until today when I see that on the 19th they included the index page. I'm assuming this is when I was trying to clean up her page and accidentally disabled the index. It was back up shortly, and google has crawled the site since then however I see this : I'm concerned because the past few days her site which had been climbing higher in the ranks than her previous site is now dropping. All of the 404 errors now go directly to the page I set up, but that was done after the last crawl. Do I just hold my breath and hope the next crawl will clear these up? Will it erase the problems on the webmaster page or just leave them there? I'm sorry I sound so inexperienced, it's because I am. I should have done a tad more research prior to the actual move, but as I said, it's too late for that. Now I have to take a deep breath and do my best to fix the problems I created. Any advice would be appreciated.
Any time you change things around you have to be prepared for a temporary drop in rankings. In time the rankings should come back. In the meantime I would focus on getting more quality backlinks. Sometimes it can take longer to recover from a drastic redesign. It takes Google a little while to decide if the website is still trustworthy after their changes.
Without proper redirection Your rank will drop Try working on the new site heavily to build up content and ranking with google
You should create a new sitemap and resubmit to Google, and also consider redirecting all the old pages to new matched ones using 301 redirections.. This way you won't face errors and will pass the value of those old pages.
Just wait it out and don't hold your breath, Google's indexing of sites can change very quickly, i have this happen plenty of times and they always come back..
Thanks for all of the quick advice. Since the initial drop when I first made the page live, I reworked SEO keywords and it was about back up to normal ranking. I resubmitted the updated site map prior to posting here, so that's taken care of (double checked it of course). I haven't done any 301 redirects, only the 404 error page, but I'll look into that. edit: Oh and I won't hold my breath. I've seen how much it can fluctuate, but I've lost several pages on one of the keywords which is why I checked the errors in the tools (I thought it was all of the old links and then realized an important page had got in there).