High number of 404's discovered?

cmeinck

Well-known member
I moved servers in December. A few weeks back I noticed a significant jump in crawl errors (404's) that occurred in December. I checked my .htaccess and from what I can tell, it's all good. I don't know if they were all old broken links that Google is finding years later or what -- I'm also thinking that perhaps I messed up something with my .htaccess during the move. I'm working through the list and setting up 301's, but would love to find the root of the problem. 90k crawl errors is not a good thing.

BTW, my sitemaps are not showing any errors. Health > Crawl Errors > Not Found shows over 93,000 errors.

For example (add http://www.)
everythingicafe.com/forum/iphone-software/increase-font-size-in-safari-without-zooming-9511.html

is now this thread:

http://www.everythingicafe.com/forum/threads/increase-font-size-in-safari-without-zooming.8403/
 
If that first link was supposed to redirect to the second link, it did not for me redirected me to the following link with a 404.
http://www.everythingicafe.com/forum/forums/ios-software/increase-font-size-in-safari-without-zooming-9511.html

Correct. That's a sample of the 90K of 404's. I've been setting up manual 301's, but that's an impossible task. Figuring that maybe someone might have suggestions on what might be missing or not working properly in my htaccess.
 
Did you look carefully at the report? I had this problem and it was goog trying to follow links to people's conversations and similar stuff......which I then fixed by disallowing those in robots.txt
 
Did you look carefully at the report? I had this problem and it was goog trying to follow links to people's conversations and similar stuff......which I then fixed by disallowing those in robots.txt

The bulk of these are older vBSEO/vBulletin links, which appear to have failed at redirecting.

I've spent quite a bit of time in Webmasters, trying to clean things up.
 
Retraced my steps and I seemed to have corrected the bulk of my issues. I configured the 301redirect file from Kier, uploaded the scripts and use the vBSEO redirect tool and placed it close to the top of my htaccess.

I'm noticing a few oddball URL's that won't redirect. Wherever there is a URL with post in it, so directing to a specific post within a thread, it seems to 404. So for example, this is a busted URL

I removed http://www to avoid having a 404 from XF.

everythingicafe.com/forum/iphone-3gs/mms-is-out-right-now-54470-post514419.html

Now if I were to change that URL to:
http://www.everythingicafe.com/forum/iphone-3gs/mms-is-out-right-now-54470.html

The current suite of redirects works -- while not to the specific post in the thread, but at least it's not a 404.

Thoughts, suggestions?
 
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