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Google bots and 404's - Help!

by Money Bomb
2 replies
  • SEO
    • |
This is just bizarre, I'm getting all sorts of love from the google bots - but they are hitting lots of 404's. Sent them up to date sitemaps and they still are hitting them.

Wordpress install, they are attempting to get my posts from a shallow link structure - My structure is fairly deep using categories and sub categories.

Why in the world would G be looking for something that isn't there? Something must be telling them to look there, perhaps a buggy plugin?

Edit: I am using /%category%/%postname%/ ---- G is looking for just /%postname%/ after the domain.
#404 #bots #google
  • Profile picture of the author Bo Mill
    I had a similar problem.

    Did you carefully analyze what exactly G! Bots are visiting from your Webmaster Central dashboard? It provides you with an overview of what links they are hitting, as well as how they "got to know" those links.

    Also, let it go for a little while. I have updated my sitemap several times and changed the misleading links on one of my websites, yet I was still receiving those unwanted hits.

    It took about a week or so for the bots to "update" themselves.

    -Bo
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    • Profile picture of the author Money Bomb
      Since submitting a new sitemap, G is finding the posts but immediately tries to find the same post under the shorter permalink as before.

      What is strange, is the permalink structure hasn't changed since populating the website - so nothing should be telling G to go there.

      All I can think of is the old sitemap gave the content structure I used when I setup the sitemap plugin. Not sure if a sitemap can do that.

      I'll wait a week or two, then maybe redirect the 404.php to the home page?
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