Help with 404 error pages needed PLEASE
- SEO |
I think the best way to describe this is by providing a sequence of events:
1. I built a site & started doing a major SEO campaign from day 1
2. After a while site sat on 1st page of SERPS consistently (position 3 for one keyphrase)
3. After 4 months of being on the 1st page, I downloaded a new template and sample data articles that came with it to the site & 2 days after doing this I was not even indexed in top 500 in Google. Problems only started at this point.
4. I rebuilt the site from scratch and waited for natural 404 death for 6 months but there was no change in ranking despite continuing SEO efforts. Literally, no movement at all for 6 months.
5. After finding x1200 404 crawl errors in Webmaster tools (WMT) a few days ago (all of which were the sample data pages I mentioned above) I deleted all 404 error pages from Google search results in WMT through the URl removal tool and my site jumped back to around position 100 in SERPS within 2 days for 4 keyphrases. So, this seemed to have helped me.
I know that the standard thing to say is 'don't delete 404's' but it evidently helped me. Plus, the problem didn't even start until the day I downloaded the sample data pages. Does anybody know how to solve this further and delete remaining live pages with weird URL structures like this - hxxp://www.capitalforextraining.com/component/content/article/21-sample-data-articles/joomla/extensions/components/1-administrator-components from my website? (((***Ok, i don't know why this link is displaying Capital Forex Training as the title. it is not spam I promise. Please refer to the URL structure once you click the link or hover over it.***)))
Pages like this are not in my CMS but they are still showing live? I don't get it.
Thanks everyone
1. I built a site & started doing a major SEO campaign from day 1
2. After a while site sat on 1st page of SERPS consistently (position 3 for one keyphrase)
3. After 4 months of being on the 1st page, I downloaded a new template and sample data articles that came with it to the site & 2 days after doing this I was not even indexed in top 500 in Google. Problems only started at this point.
4. I rebuilt the site from scratch and waited for natural 404 death for 6 months but there was no change in ranking despite continuing SEO efforts. Literally, no movement at all for 6 months.
5. After finding x1200 404 crawl errors in Webmaster tools (WMT) a few days ago (all of which were the sample data pages I mentioned above) I deleted all 404 error pages from Google search results in WMT through the URl removal tool and my site jumped back to around position 100 in SERPS within 2 days for 4 keyphrases. So, this seemed to have helped me.
I know that the standard thing to say is 'don't delete 404's' but it evidently helped me. Plus, the problem didn't even start until the day I downloaded the sample data pages. Does anybody know how to solve this further and delete remaining live pages with weird URL structures like this - hxxp://www.capitalforextraining.com/component/content/article/21-sample-data-articles/joomla/extensions/components/1-administrator-components from my website? (((***Ok, i don't know why this link is displaying Capital Forex Training as the title. it is not spam I promise. Please refer to the URL structure once you click the link or hover over it.***)))
Pages like this are not in my CMS but they are still showing live? I don't get it.
Thanks everyone