So recently I updated my site from Joomla to Wordpress. (best decision of my life...seriously)
All of my old Joomla links were formatted with a ? right after my domain name like this: www.example.com/?blah
Now when I switched to Wordpress, I'm using pretty URLs that are formatted like this : www.example.com/blah
Now googles got all the old Joomla urls still indexed so when searched for it still gives you the old URLs. In my head those Joomla URLs should throw a 404 error. But they don't! They just display the homepage.
For Example - if you go to www.example.com/blah it will throw a 404 error because that page doesn't exist, however if you go to www.example.com/?blah it will show that URL in the address bar, but display the homepage despite the fact that that page does not exist either.
So my questions are:
1) will google eventually dump those URLs in favor of my Wordpress ones? How will that hurt my SEO and page rank - does google still see that as a valid page and keep it in its index?
2) How do I force 404 errors for those URLs that don't exist anymore with a question mark.
(1) You'll have to get your sitemap redone and have GoogleBot reindex your site. Google Webmaster Tools should be the place to do that.
(2) You could redirect the invalid links to a 404 page using your .htaccess file
Related
My problem is that my client has migrated from Wordpress to Shopify, and there were some important pages on the site under the /services/ folder. I wanted to redirect them to their new pages after the migration, which are /pages/ pages.
Shopify has reserved /services/ URLs, however. Therefore I cannot redirect mydomain.com/services/some-services-page to mydomain.com/pages/some-services-page.
Additionally, I cannot change the URLs of the /pages/ pages to /services/ pages.
What would be the next best step here? It seems like a significant limitation of Shopify, as any pages you want to migrate from another CMS that have /services/, apparently can't be redirected, and you lose the SEO value. Those pages are now returning 404 and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it, or am I missing something?
I've had some back and forth with Shopify support, which ultimately ends with them saying its a limitation of Shopify and I should submit a feature request. I appreciate any advice you might have.
You can manually create redirects from old relative urls to new ones on shopify by going to [yourstore].myshopify.com/admin/redirects
If you want to track which pages customers are exactly hitting and getting 404's, you can use app Transportr:
https://apps.shopify.com/transportr
It tracks which pages are getting 404, and you can also create redirects directly from an app
I just notice a bug in my WordPress sites when I am adding any number after a blog post or page URL it's not showing any 404 error or its just a valid page
like I have a site
https://www.gryffin.com/ so if I visiting this URL https://www.gryffin.com/features/ and adding any number after this URL https://www.gryffin.com/features/98989 like this it should show the error of page not exist but it's not giving this error I check other WordPress sites have the same issue I think its not good on SEO point of view can anybody give me solution of it.
Still a bit new at this so please go easy on me and I have tried searching for an answer but have been unable to find one that specifically helps me. I have a wordpress site that I have built a custom php page to deliver results from a database to display information and have manually inserted code to display the header and footer of my wordpress theme.
Also, in my .htaccess I have used the
rewriterule ^used-boats-for-sale/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/(.*)/$ /boatdetails.php?recordnumber=$5 [L]
to forward the friendly url so the php page can process the correct record number to process and display the results. This was the only way I could figure out how to do this in wordpress and bypass wordpress's subfolder killer.
My issue arises as google webmaster tools is telling me I have duplicate title tags and descriptions, even though I have added a canonical reference to the friendly url.
Examples of both can be seen here:
http://www.unitedyacht.com/used-boats-for-sale/hinckley/downeast/cruiser/2000/1807/
and
http://www.unitedyacht.com/boatdetails.php?recordnumber=1807
So with the canonical, why is google still showing it as a dupe and what can I do to correct it? If I put a r=301 in, it redirects the url completely and removes the friendly url from the browser.
I have a problem with a Wordpress based website. Something is creating strange URLs. I know about those URLs, because Google Webmaster Developer try to Crawl them and the Crawler gets a 404 error (Not found). I have that problem in different websites:
In the first one the URLs looks like spam:
http://xxxx.com/wp-content/w3tc/apple-iphone-3gs-8gb-black-manual
In the other website the URLs make sense based on the content, but they are not valid URLs:
http://xxxx.com/portfolio/pool-view-suite-bathroom/
In other website, it's creating URLs that looks like valid, but with a ".html" in the final
If you try to access those URLs, you will get a 404 error. Curiously, when you look the "Linked By" tan in Google Developer Tools, you will see that is linked by another strange URL o there is no linked from. And that URLs are not in the sitemap, I checked it.
Thank you!
the first one is a trojan without a doubt. Quite usually, you'll find them in index.php, footer.php, header.php . If in doubt, check with an online tool like Sucuri
Once you isolate it, it's very important to know how you have it. While most people thinks they have been "hacked", in most cases you uploaded it by yourself from your own computer, so be sure to scan it thoroughly.
About the other cases, sounds more like an htaccess issue, but based on the first case, quite probably it's caused by this trojan as well. Ask your host to check the site, it's in their best interest to do it so. But assuming it's just htaccess, try this: go to Settings --> Permalinks and change the permalinks structure to anything else than what you have now. Don't hit the submit button yet. In the meanwhile, BACKUP your htaccess file and then delete it. Hit submit on the permalinks page an a new .htaccess file will be created. Try your site now. If it works, it was just a simple htaccess issue. If not, something else, going from a trojan to a server misconfiguration to anything in between
Maybe the domain was used before and you are seeing past valid urls which are now 404, or maybe these are incorrect, inbound spammy links which you would want to be 404. Duff links can be found anywhere on the internet and so no reason to think your site is generating them.
My blog's been up for a year or so, and 90% of our traffic comes from Google, so I want to make sure that I'm handling this permalink change properly. I recently read on Wordpress' codex that including the numerical %post_id% at the beginning of your permalinks can greatly reduce the stress on your database, when a post or page is being fetched. So, I decided to change my permalink structure from /%postname%/ to /%post_id%/postname/.
Now, if I type in, or click on a link to my site in google that looks like this - http://blog.com/cool-post/, it seems to redirect to my new structure: http://blog.com/34424/cool-post/ without a hitch. I'm trying to figure out whether I need to use a 301 redirect plugin or not. I would like to think that search engines like Google will see the same "flawless" redirection that I'm seeing. There doesn't seem to be any broken links. Just looking to confirm that I'll be okay after this change.
Thanks
WordPress handles canonical redirects for you by sending 301 Moved Permanently status codes appropriately. That status code ensures Google will only index your posts by the new URLs (i.e. with the post IDs in your permalinks). I've not used a redirection plugin for a while and my sites have been indexed similarly just fine.