Hi guys I have an old site with about 200 pages. I've actually deleted the whole site and am currently redoing the whole thing cause it was so messed up. Google's now picked up a lot of 404 (not found) pages and I redirected them all to the main page. There is also a warning message: URLs not followed When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot because they contained too many redirects. Please change the URLs in your Sitemap that redirect and replace them with the destination URL (the redirect target). All valid URLs will still be submitted. initially there were redirected pages that didn't even exist. long story shot I had something like: page A --> page B --> page C Completely messed up so now its page A --> page C Only problem is I havent uploaded all the corresponding new pages yet. How should I fix this? advice? is it not allowed to have too many pages redirect to the main page? Thanks guys
I'm not sure if you will be penalized for having to many redirecting pages, but you can remove some of those pages in google webmaster tools.
You should have left the old one on until you got the new one up. Now that you have all messed up, I don't think you can do much to fix this. You would loose the rankings for previous pages anyways.
Redirect all pages to home page, that is the right thing to do, but I suggest you do not submit the deleted pages, that are now being redirected to home page, in the sitemap. In sitemaps, only submit the urls that actually exists.