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I have my site up for last two and a half months and I have changed the content a lot within this time. I have submitted my site to both google webmasters tool and yahoo site explorer. Still I am getting very poor search engine results - most of them are old deleted results giving 404 errors. I think I have goofed up with the robots.txt or .htaccess - can anybody help?

My Website: http://www.yourworldofphotography.com/

Robots.txt content:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/

To get good ranking for your keywords on search results you will have to do some more tasks such as building quality backlinks on those specific keywords, submitting site details in popular social bookmarking sites to draw visitor traffic, create good/proper title/meta description for pages on your site....the robots file looks ok...

Yes, I heard that a lot of times. But could not figure out exactly what to do and how to do. I searched a lot in the web for a step by step instruction, but could not get much. Do you know how to do it?

Hi...

Note that 404 Not found error will "reduce" your site rank, especially Google
You can use Remove page feature on Google Webmaster
Go to Site configuration > crawler access > remove URL

Removal requirement : http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... 9819&hl=en

Other tips for SEO, see this post : viewtopic.php?f=544&t=414537&p=1748659#p1748659

Hope this helps:)

I had the same problem , i mean i have searched on so many resources over the web, but many a times my work was in vain. Basically i hired a person who got my work done for affordable cost specifically in the area i wanted the work done. I am sure you will find someone who can do that for you All the best.

Thanks for this tips. I did it how you said. I submitted removal request for 19 of my URLs, but after they are removed, 27 more appeared in the 404 list (see the attachment). To my surprise, there are a few URLs(for example: note the 1st and 2nd in the list) which are actually correct URLs. You can check yourself also.

I am totally clueless now and I think I have goofed up some big thing somewhere. Please help me out.

BTW, i use sh404SEF.

dont delete articles

move them to an archive , and they will always render if requested
\

are you telling me to move those articles, which ae coming in 404 list of google, to archive?

those articles might be still in yourtrash

IF they are create an archive category and move them over

No the articles are not in trash. rather they are active. As i said, I found a few urls (for example the 1st and the 2nd one in the list) in the google 404 list which are still active. what should i do?

One more point I would like to know. I read somewhere that I should ping google after I made some update in my website. What does that 'pinging' means? Should re-submit my sitemap?

Based my experience, if we remove page in our site then we can get 404 error not found on Google. Why ? because removed page in our site "still exist" in crawler / database google. That's way we will receive 404 Not found on Google, so we should remove it from Google too.


I checked both link and yes, still active
i think this is weird issue, maybe issue with your sef extension (sh404SEF) ? because that's complex extension and has a lots of configuration. and unfortunately i never use this extension before


See this post : viewtopic.php?f=544&t=367852&p=1608478#p1608478

You can also use Ping extensions if you want :
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions ... adata/8488
or
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions ... /blog/7702

You don't need resubmit sitemap because if you create new article in your site then Sitemap (on Google Webmaster) will update itself automatically

Regards