Are you losing search engine rankings due to 404 errors?
A few weeks ago a friend came to me wondering why his search engine positions had suddenly dropped from 3 to 182 for his main keyword.
Well it turns out he had restructured his site, changing from static pages to a dynamic WordPress site. The title tags, and content remained the same and the new pages had been indexed. This left me scratching my head for a moment.
I looked through his Google Webmaster Central account and found the following:
404 Errors in Webmaster Central
The URLs had changed! 28 pages returned 404 errors to the search engine crawlers, this accounted for over 70% of his site. Now Google is all about giving a great user experience but it encountered this staggering flaw, hence the site was punished with lower positions.
Quick as a flash, I added the appropriate 301 redirects to the .htaccess file, and within a week of the crawlers acknowledging this the site was back where it belonged.
No matter how much linking or keyword rich copy you add, if there’s 404’s being returned to the crawlers you’re not going to reach your full potential. Check your log files and Webmaster Central account and get them redirect immediately.
