I just bought a site a few days ago and have not made any changes, other than the adsense code and removing the old owners analytics code. I know the site has a lot of backlinks from articles to directories, etc. Today I was looking at the latest visitors and noticed that a lot of the traffic goes to page with file names like: my_site.html. All the file names are not my-site.html There are a ton of 404 error codes. I am pretty sure that the old owner changed the file/page names to have the (-) instead of an underscore. This is a 2year old site. I know that this is going to have a neg effect on my placement in the search engines. Can anyone give me any advice? Most of the index pages in google show the underscore page names.
i can help you out on that and custom-code you a "catcher-script" which catches the 404´s and redirects them to the new pages if possible, else it sends people to the sitemap. PM me along with your messenger id (yahoo/icq/msn/googletalk - all fine )
I actually researched and added 301 redirect codes for all of the pages using the sitemap. It was a little hard since I didn't know all of th old file names. Was a 301 okay to use?
nice offer happpy. Basically you need to determine what file names are causing 404 errors and then use your .htaccess file to 301 redirect those visitors to the new pages. A 301 redirect will also redirect googlebot and keep your rankings in the same position.
well you are lucky if it was so easy to be done perfectly via simple htaccess/rewrite rules anyway in harder cases where extended logic is needed, you know i have a solution handy