Sunstone

Thanks for the link and your reply. Hopefully, given a little time this might work itself out. Cheers

Hi all Im having an issue with a growing number of Soft 404 errors on our site. Despite a record year for us last year in terms of traffic, we first started seeing these errors from 1st May last year where it jumped from 0 soft 404 errors to 77 pages with these errors, literally overnight. We've been a little slow in responding to these and we've currently got half of our pages now with this error (126 Pages). Our webdev / SEO company have looked at the errors and have rewritten a few of the pages with new content in a bid to remedy the issue but Google still does not want to know. We cant get our heads around it as the usual reasons for Soft 404 dont seem to apply given Google response to our attempts at a fix but obviously there is something lurking somewhere which we simply cannot see. The worrying thing is that we're now pretty much at a stage where we are 50% of our pages are now marked as having a soft 404 error. As a business that solely relies on page rankings its quite the concern. Could anyone offer any advice or experience on a similar matter? Thanks in advance Ste

After running some of the web speed reports and following the guidance from both Google Pagespeed insights tool and GTMetrix, I've manage to get the site seemingly in a better place. with Google's insight tool now reporting 77 for mobile and 99 for Desktop. it was something ridiculous like 12 and 51 or something like that. GT Metrix is giving the site an A (Pagespeed 98%) & B (YSlow 85%) rating, where it was D & E or was that E & F? ...pass.... Quite chuffed tbh but pee'd off that what took me a couple of hours of dabbling wasnt done in the first place by the 'professionals'.

Feeling increasingly bitter towards the company and somewhat towards myself for having giving the project to them. They have confirmed that : they're happy all redirects have been done in the right way for both search engines and the site itself. Although my contact cannot tell me how ti works without (apparently) spending hours pulling apart the 'module' that handles the redirects......wow. the speed issues were because of a plugin that was working but now isnt, they're looking at this. (a compression plugin). Is this normal? Shouldnt websites be fairly speedy without compression plugins ? Ive taken on board your feedback and Im currently trying to get the site onto a test environment so I can pull the thing apart and rip out the theme to see whats left. As the site seems to be in a bit of a pickle, I thought I'd try and wedge a better theme in there if I can (we'll see) and whilst doing that refresh the content and smarten up the links. Being rather unhappy with the state of the site I'd rather try and start again than flog this dead horse, although that is my last resort should it come to it.

I totally agree. It IS hugely important to give the customers more of the right information. More help and guidance the better!......and yes, nail hit squarely on the head 👌

Great idea btw! PS the check for cats thing, is a great idea. Im not a cat owner but do know they can get comfy anywhere! 👌

It will have to done as part of the clean up for sure.

My thinking was to use the article as a lesson to customers. It was a customer wanting a skip on their driveway, they filled it with really heavy waste which caused some minor damage to the driveway. Was wanting to advise customers in a pro-active kind of way, using it as a lesson to others but at the sametime I am hesitant over publishing it for the same reasons you have outlined above.

I guess after having used 'coverage' instead of 'landing-pages' Im a little hesitant about changing the url again for fear of a backlash from Google. (again) Absolutely makes sense what you say, it cleans it up for sure. Should I be afraid to make this change ?

I've just spotted that. Jeeeez, that shouldnt be there, It wasnt on the original. 😒 Thanks to you good people I can see some direction in which to go with this. A lot of which seems blummin billy basic stuff which really shouldnt be the issue.

Thats possibly the only positive I can take from this so far. Im so annoyed with these guys. I have added a case study already but have a question, well 2 actually, 1) ive started to write a slightly more negative piece, is it best to avoid a warts n all article? Its only regarding some damage done to a drive and how to avoid it. (wasnt our fault as it happens) 2) Do new articles need to be added to a sitemap ?

Right now, im ready to lynch some sod by the short n curlies. So frustrating the mess this is in. It sounds like a lot of work to a novice. What are the considerations to tweaking the url structure? would that be setting up the necessary redirects once the work is done? Thankyou again for your help with this. The fix list is quickly growing. 😡

Hi Jack As you have pointed out above, what im being told just does not sound plausible in any shape tbh. The company explained the following to me : '.........in the xxxx.php file there is a function ss_custom_post_types where you can update the slug for location pages. The redirects that you see are done by Wordpress automatically once these urls are changed. It is line 22 - one line of code does them all, it isn't your traditional set up of one 301......' The bit of code they refer to above is :'rewrite' => array("slug" => 'landing-pages', 'with_front' => true), But i believe that this only handles the slug name? i.e. the 'landing-pages' bit in the url. My concern here, is where exactly is the redirect information for Search engines to follow? Surely there should be something somewhere? Ok, wordpress knows where its pages are but whats telling Google et al where the pages are? Am I right in thinking that as well everything else mentioned here on these posts that the general feeling is that this company has done a bodge job on this new 'improved' website website? Sorry for the slight rant, just a bit of frustration boiling over. Thanks again Cheers Steven

Would this be a case of making those pages a 'child' of the Bedfordshire page? is this how I would obtain that url structure?

Thanks for this btw. It really all greatly helps (all of you!). After getting through the weekend and taking on board all of your feedback. Im sat wondering what the holy hell these guys were upto when putting this together. Im appalled that this is the result of 18 months work and im incredibly gutted that I paid for this utter garbage, for which I have to sort out. What a joke! Lesson learned the hard way!

Thats great thanks for the above, I@ll check this out. I forgot to mention the algorithm thing too. Just as we launched the site in mid April, we saw that both of the major algorithm releases impacted the new site as we witnessed a drop shortly after, so there was a number of things that could have impacted the new site from the off. So frustrating. Can only hope to somehow breathe some new life into this as it was looking pretty good early 2019.

1 Changing the theme. Given that there are functions that process customer payments and privide customers with quotes and the ability to order skips online. Will changing the theme impact this key functionality? 2. Spammy location pages. Stick them in a blog-like structure with severely re-written content? 3. Have to agree here. Making the old site responsive is easy? any clues?

Really, how do you know they use people in India, thats hugely worrying. A couple of hours? 😕 We genuinely provide skip hire to many parts of the UK. There is no plausible way to reach out online other than to have a non-geographical phone number. I cant carry 300+ landline numbers as it would not be efficient to do so. Many of the suppliers we use have generic numbers also. We are registered at Orion house and have an office there. We would not divulge the suppliers that we use publicly however they are represented by the areas we cover.

I wouldnt disagree here. Its felt mis-managed throughout. Been a project / business that I started from scratch and have nurtured over the past 5 years, steadily growing it to a decent enough level to employ a very small team only to have it bulldozed down in less than 4 months. Gutted isnt the word.

Hi The url is budgetskipsdirect.co.uk The content is the same but the structure is different. I believe when launched, the robots.txt file was simply telling search engines to go away. Apparently this was fixed. Relatively quickly however. Thankyou for you reply Steven

I've notied its a better for desktop @ 73. at least its not entirely on its backside but 18 is v poor.

Wow! thats not good at all. oh dear.... where to begin fixing these issues?

Hi There The traffic was mostly natural. From search results. Nothing complex going on with the site. yes its the budgetskipsdirect.co.uk website. and yes, the SEO team at the website company who built the siuter had suggested that the re-indexing the new site may have woken up Google to the landing pages structure. Although in the past, any extra area pages that I added would pretty quickly rise up the rankings. If this new site has screwed all that up, then its pretty disappointing With regards to putting the old site back....it was discussed but I'd be putting a site back that was not mobile friendly, it wasnt a responsive website. I fear that after 4 months we may have missed that window for recovery? ! Thanks for your reply btw! Very much appreciated.

Hi all Im hoping you can confirm or allay my suspicions. I had a company redevelop my blossoming website. They started it late 2017 and only managed to launch April this year. A little bit longer than the 3-6months window that was given. Anyway (I do tend to waffle!), before the launch of the new, revised site, the old website was seeing its best traffic numbers since launching 5 years ago. Being a seasonal business, summer is our peak. However we were seeing traffic in early to mid April way better than any summer we had previously had so it was looking quite exciting and doubly so with the new site launching. So, the new site launches and we immediately see traffic disintegrate. We're 4 months on and we're now less than half of the figures that we saw in April, which is greatly disappointing. They pretty much match end of year figures, so gutted really. As part of the new site specification, I asked that there be a url change where 'landing-pages' was to be changed to 'coverage'. I believe after some frantic research this may have been a large part of the issue. Possibly. The SEO company (the comany that built this site AND the original site) tried various things to boost the hits / page ranking, telling me each time to be patient, to wait some days and weeks. They admit to having made a mistake where the site was initially telling search engines to NOT index the site. Apparently this was overlooked at the time of launch but was soon rectified, they tell me this shouldnt have caused the impact on the site that I was seeing in terms of traffic. Apparently Google Search Console was looking ok at this point.!!!?! After now what is 4 months on since its launch, a decision was made to change the url back to its original 'landing-pages'. Apparently Google does not seem to like the new use of 'coverage' in the URL as it was still showing the old URL in many search results even after much remedial work was carried out to try and force Google re-index pages, including removal of redirect 301's to get Google to read the new 'coverage' URL. 'Fair enough'. I thought, we need to get some traction back to the site. Being a little technical minded and in a position where id have to manage the website, I asked to know where the redirects were setup as they were not in the usual .htaccess file where they had historically been. At first they couldnt tell me, it took them about 6-8 weeks to come back to me with response, they had to chase their outsourced developer on this. Their response is below : ----------- '.........in the xxxx.php file there is a function ss_custom_post_types where you can update the slug for location pages. The redirects that you see are done by Wordpress automatically once these urls are changed. It is line 22 - one line of code does them all, it isn't your traditional set up of one 301......' --------- I know little when it comes to redirects but is the above redirect setup likely to have hindered the new site finding its feet online? could it have caused Google et al to wonder what was going on with the new site or is the above a normal practice? I've built wordpress sites before but whenever Ive come across the need to redirect pages, its always been through the use of the /htaccess file. Can anyone shed a light on this ? Thanks in advance Steven

HI All I've taken a copy of our online wordpress website with the intention on configuring it locally for testing purposes. I have it up and running however the page links from the navigation menu do not work, I simply get a 404 error. The same applies with the landingpages. I did get the navigation menu to work, but only if I change the permalink setting to the default setting, which isnt ideal. Despite this setting being in place the landing pages do not work. Likewise when I'm editing them and click 'view page' they throw up the 404 error, which is odd as the pages are obviously present. I have successfully managed a migration of this site before from a live server environment but can I heck as like get this to work locally?! Can anyone point me in the right direction? Many Thanks Steve