(we migrated on the 8th)

When I checked googles webmaster tools today the bot is picking up hundreds of 404's
almost a hundred look something like this
/index.asp?PageAction=ADVSEARCH&AdvSearchAction=CRAWL&intResults=25&txtSearchAllWords=kit&txtSearchExactPhrase=
&txtSearchWithOneOfTheWords=&txtSearchWithoutWords=&lngLookinCategoryID=2&txtLooksIn=&txtSortOrder=&lngResults=&intLowestRating=0&Page=1

and for the most part the balance look like this
/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWSERIES&ManfID=17&SeriesID=478

there were a few with the old emialafriend wordage too (perhaps from deleted products)

Wondering what to do with them. Should I create redirects? Will this hurt rankings? If I redirect a hundred of them to /index.aspx will the bot be mad? Hmm does the bot even get mad...

Any thoughts?

Hey Powderday,
I have it from a reliable source that the G00glebots are really p1zzed off right now and plotting to take us down. In regard to your question, they might be little computer programs, but "darn it," they have feelings! (IMG:http://forums.networksolutions.com/style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif) According to the latest issue of S3arch3ngin3 N3wz - G00gl3bots favor eating the owners of rogue websites!!!


Actually, I would be more concerned about the 301's and ensuring that your redirects are working. Mine seem to be spot on for every link I've tried.

It would make sense that a 404 would show from a bot - since the page is actually not there any longer. Regardless of the 404 posted from a bot hitting a dead end, I would believe that the 301 takes over and does the actual direction for a searcher.

Hope that helps - and I hope Im right!
:-)

well the 301's that did create are working and not resulting in 404's.
301's were not automatically created for the manufacturer series it seems...
not sure what all the advanced search ones are.... was thinking about creating a redirect for all of them abck to the home page. But wasnt sure what google would think of a few hundred pages redirecting to the home page.

oh, and before migration we didn't have any 404's...

Hi PowderDay,

If you look at that link above it is for a search query. We cannot redirect your search queries from a 4.x site to a 7.x site as the search is completely different. So if you have links on your 7.x site that go to 4.x search queries, you will need to change those. Any other page such as your products, category, homepage, etc those we will redirect properly.

Joe

We are getting 404s as well. A few hundred, and most of them are related to the old add a product review links. It appears that they are products that have been deleted, and I am guessing that these links are coming from accidentally indexed pages that google had for the product review links in our index.

It is annoying to see 404s, have to figure out which ones are legit to worry about, and which ones are not, but IMO it all stems from us including PROD review links in our sitemap or forgeting to disallow in those in our robot.txt file initially and googlebot going ahead an indexing em.

the /index.asp?PageAction=VIEWSERIES&ManfID=17&SeriesID=478
ones seem like that should have had redirects (manufacturer & manufacturer series on v4)

I guess I will leave the search ones alone and try and figure out were the manufacturer ones were trying to go.

Then maybe re review the current robots file

Hi PowderDay,

In v7 we do not have series any more so we would not have a place to redirect them to. A straight manufacturer page one to one will redirect.

Joe

Thanks Joe. It would have been nice if "it" could have taken all the series info and created redirects to the manufacturer.
IE
mfg1
mfg1 series1
mfg1 series2
mfg1 series3

all somehow redirected to the new mfg page, assuming there is one???

Not having a record of the old mfg#'s and series#'s I guess I will just have to check the 404's as they occur, try and figure out were they wanted to go and then create 500 redirects... or just give up and eventually the old links will go away. Not sure the importance google places on the old links??

Hi PowderDay,

At this point the best bet would be to let the links die, google will see that they no longer exist and will drop them from the index. The most important part though is that your products and categories redirect as that is typically what people will look for when searching google. These pages also did not contain as much text as your product pages so they won't rank high anyways for your site.

Though if you want to put more prominence of your manufacturers on your site and get those indexed, what I would do is add the manufacturers module to one of the columns or set up some links to those pages. You could also setup specific custom pages describing your manufacturers, their products, etc and then have those pages link to the built in manufacturer page. Finally I would add those links to your google sitemap and next time you submit those pages will get picked up and crawled and then you will be good to go.

By doing this and having the more text it will make the pages a little more credible than the 4.x ones and they will get ranked higher which will give you an even better seo result than the default series page from 4.x.

Joe

Thanks, I am probably just being a little paranoid (IMG:http://forums.networksolutions.com/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) We have made great strides with google and yahoo in the past 18 months and really just want to make sure we are pushing forward. I think the information we have added in V7 and the structural changes are really going to have a positive effect!

We have set up manufacturer pages with more text (and more in the works) when we changed from V4 to V7. So we do hope to get more depth and better ranking on more detailed search queries in the future!