Major problem with google webmaster with pages not found

[seaside man]

Hi i am using sef404 and at the moment i have major problems with my google webmaster account. For some reason i have 12000 pages not found which is causing me problems and i have tried to redirect them with the joomla control panel but they are not working and i have been told that the old version of sef404 do not allow you to redirect pages using the 301 technique.

Can anyone please let me know how i solve this and have these pages shown as found or redirect them using 301

regards

[beededea]

You would need 000s of 301 redirects to handle 000s of pages not found. Can you take a step back and explain again what the problem is? Make it a little clearer so we have ALL the information.

What version of Joomla and sef404?

[seaside man]

i made a mistake on my sh404sef and cleared the cache, think that is what i done. made some changes and pressed saved and then it came up with you are about to clear x amount of records and without understanding i just continued. this has now resulted in thousands of 404 pages.

as well as this, i have got rid of some pages as i did not need them any more and they are also coming back as page not found. i went into my cpanel and used the redirect but it is not working. i have tried using the htaccess file but not sure what i am doing.

here are some examples of pages not found

[beededea]

Understood, now which version of Joomla and 404sef? don't forget to answer all questions.

[seaside man]

i am using the older version of joomla and sef Installed version: 1.3.9 - build_357 - Joomla -

[beededea]

1.3.9? - that makes no sense. do you mean Joomla 1.5.9?

[seaside man]

the joomla i have is Joomla! 1.0.13 Stable but not sure how to find out which version of sh404SEF i have.

[beededea]

Righto, I think you have diagnosed the problem, you cleared the SEF cache and you removed all your SEF URLs. What to do about it is another thing.

The SEF URLs are created on the fly when visitors click on the links, so if 404 SEF is configured correctly it should recreate them as visitors land on them, this may obviously take some time. The first solution that I can think of is to use the site: command in Google.

So, in the Google bar type in site:domainname.com and see all the links that Google maintains, hopefully all the old links will still be there. You could trawl that list and import each and everyone into the SEF table using the tools that 404SEF supplies. That might take a while...

A better suggestion might be to find a tool that can trawl your whole site and visit every page. I know of a tool called Linky that will open all the links on a page but not one that will trawl the whole site.

What you could simply do is to wait for a week or a month until all the articles are read by visitors and then resubmit the site to the webmaster tool and in future make sure you do not clear the SEF cache again!

[beededea]

Lastly, this has nothing to do with SEF URLs but you MUST (as a separate task) upgrade Joomla to 1.0.15. You may then want to start thinking about what you want to do with this older Joomla site.

This may be an interesting post to review:

viewtopic.php?f=48&t=621745

And don't double post.

[seaside man]

thank you for this great information. I have had people try before to up grade the site to the latest joomla but it did not work. any suggestions would be great. i am just trying to get my head around this. before i did that with the sef component, i already had around 1000 not found pages that were there for months and months. i tried doing the webmaster tool to delete them but it took for ever.

so you are saying that if i click on a page that is not there, example http://www.in2town.co.uk/Abbey-Clancy-s ... h-says-wag this page will eventually sort itself out.

how do i know that i have my sef set properly to do this. i have tried clicking this page a few times over the past week and it still goes to 404 error

also can you let me know what this means

http://www.in2town.co.uk/Michelle-Colli ... inst-Botox
404 (Not found)

unavailable
Jul 4, 2011

it is the unavailable that i do not understand

[beededea]

The page is unavailable as it doesn't exist. No pages exist within Joomla just the URLs, if you have SEF turned on. You removed the SEF URL so it is unavailable.

As I briefly alluded to, the SEF URLs are created on the fly, SEF tools work by creating artificial URLs to the content. You may want to read this post:
http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?p=2441663

You say "how do i know that i have my sef set properly to do this?" That is a very hard thing to answer as it is down to you to configure SEF so I assume you have taken some technical assistance or read up on it beforehand, tested it perhaps? I am not sure whether you are actually asking a question here...

What you could do is to visit the 404SEf site and look at the forums there and check your settings and look for problems that match. I do not use your SEF tool so I will not be able to configure it for you.



On the other subject, the upgrade: You need to be specific to avoid ambiguityand realise that I am being very specific too. I never said anything about upgrading to the latest version of Joomla. I said you need to upgrade to 1.0.15. Note this is a separate issue and will not resolve your SEF problem in any way. I would do it later when the SEF URL problem is resolved.

[beededea]

Do me a favour, please try to use at least some grammar in the next post, capitals at beginning of sentences and a basic attempt appears to show some courtesy, it feels like you can be bothered... I always do it as it shows common courtesy.

As I am trying to help it is always nice when people at least try to use some grammar. I am NOT a grammar-Nazi! and I make mistakes myself, but please try.

[seaside man]

You are not very nice beededea for your information i have been in a car accident and have my arm in plaster which makes it very difficult to type never mind grammer

[beededea]

I was actually being very nice, otherwise I wouldn't be helping, sorry to hear that you are unwell.