lots of 404 , site redesign,file name extensions causing it to drop in Google???

Status
Not open for further replies.

tom182

New Member
hi all,
i recently did a revamp of a very old site (7yrs with little or no changes) and have noticed a lot of 404's in my crawl errors,
(there are from external sites)
The old site used the extension .htm, the new one uses .html but the prefix file names are the same . eg.
mysite.com/instructions.htm is now mysite.com/instructions.html I resubmitted a new sitemap which only lists the *.html files

what should I do ??

Thanks
 

link8r

New Member
Hi Tom

Do you have a proper 404 error page? If you do, Google should remove them automatically (anything from 24 hours to 3 months).

404 errors, even 100k, shouldn't cause a site to drop but they may cause issues with new files being indexed.

Ideally if other sites are linking to www.mysite.com/bingo.htm, then your htaccess file should 301 the "bingo.htm" to "bingo-new.html" - this will remove the 404 error and also allow people coming in off the link on the 3rd party site to find the correct page. It also should authority to pass to the new page from the 3rd party site (at Google's discretion and if any)

If it really worries you, you can also manually remove the 404's by requesting a URL removal from Google Webmaster tools, this is normally resolved within 12 hours
 

tom182

New Member
hi link8r,
much appreciated, I dont have a propoer 404 page but will look into doing one,

if i understand you correctly I would create a htaccess file and enter the following (found this on Htaccess Mod Rewrite Examples, 301 Redirects, Dynamic URL Rewrites)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^bingo\.htm$ http://www.mysite.com/bingo.html [R=301,]
RewriteRule ^darts\.htm$ http://www.mysite.com/darts.html [R=301,]
RewriteRule ^banter\.htm$ http://www.mysite.com/banter.html [R=301,L]

this is all new territory to me, so not 100% sure
thanks,
Tom
 

link8r

New Member

tom182

New Member
ok Great, think I'm getting my head around it now, I only put in the 'L' on the last line as my link above mentions "Note the use of "L" to depict the last HTACCESS rewrite rule."

do you know if this is correct, i ll try my hosting company but the not that helpful
thanks again
 

tom182

New Member
I get a 500 internal error apprear in browser window
"Error 500: Internal Server Error

The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request.

The problem is on the server side, not with your browser or the address. Most probably, a certain service (e.g., Tomcat engine) is down. Please contact your webmaster."
 

link8r

New Member
my apologies - I thought you were getting the 404 error in webmaster tools - talk about jumping to conclusions.

Sounds like a hosting issue / issue with how your site is setup
 

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
You should be able to force a rewrite / redirect from all the old extensions to the new ones ie. map .html > .html (or whatever the pattern is)
If the new file names follow a consistent pattern then you'd add to that regular expression
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top