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How Correct 404 Errors Due to Temporary URL Change?

by Gabriel Sutton
3 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I hired an amateur website designer who ended up changing every URL on my site and then didn't correct it for two weeks. Over that time, our site was indexed by Google, so when we fixed the issue, we had a bunch of results on Google that were aiming at the wrong URLs.

So the question is: How do I tell Google that one URL has been changed to another without 301 redirects? I'd rather not use 301 redirects since I've read they can hurt SEO.

I tried resubmitting all the URLs to Google for indexing. I also resubmitted our sitemap. Now, both the incorrect URL AND the correct URL now appear Google search results. Also, we're still getting crawl errors related to the URLs that no longer exist.

I'm not sure why Google is still indexing URLs that no longer exist. They do not appear on our sitemap and there are no links going to them.

Are 301 redirects the only solution to this?

Thanks
#404 #change #correct #due #errors #temporary #url
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  • Profile picture of the author Eric Riltz
    301 redirects are not evil.

    Google encourages you to use them for changing URLs:
    https://support.google.com/webmaster...er/93633?hl=en

    They cause troubles when you use them for blackhat purposes, like you create a lot of pages, and then 301 redirect all of them to one single page to transfer authority (which does not work anymore)
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  • Profile picture of the author goddess dynasty
    You also share on Google plus it is more beneficial for your website.
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  • Profile picture of the author sociaux
    OK so I built a website using X the Theme, cornerstone wordpress but I used a staging site temporary URL so that I wouldn't have to point the domain name straight away. When I pointed the domain to the folder, it points correctly but when I go to look at the pages I get a 404 error however I can get into the wordpress back end. I changed the site URL and Home using phpMyadmin, I click to save the Permalinks, used Velvet Blues Update URLs to replace the URLs however all my pages are coming up with "page not found". Basically, I've done all I know to ensure that the old links are not referred to but every page seems to be having this problem. for more information visit on badcreditautoloans.me..
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