Approximately 3 months ago, I created a Google Site to replace an existing site that I had hosted with Go Daddy for several years. I made this change primarily because of a number of coding errors made by previous hired web designers. Since Google Sites allows me the ability to manage my own site, I thought that this would be a wise choice for me.
Though all the page urls are different from my previous site, I transferred the domain, http://www.StrongFamilies.us, to point to the Google Sites. This domain has a Google PageRank of 3. Since creating this Google Site, I noticed that visits to my site drastically decreased. According to Google Webmaster Tools, the current traffic is direct or referred but not organic. It doesn’t appear that anyone is reaching my site via keywords. I thought that since I transferred the domain, the number of organic visits to my site would not change.
I cross referenced each site page with http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html with minimal to no errors reported.
Google and the other search engines apparently continue to index my previous site pages even though Go Daddy deleted the site. After phoning Go Daddy, they told me that they cannot control whether previous site pages continue to be indexed by search engines. When clicking on a page from my previous site, viewers are taken to my Google Site with text ‘Page not found’ on it. As a result, Google and Bing Webmaster Tools are reporting a significant number of crawling errors.
I previously posted threads to the Google Sites forum concerning these issues but to date, no one has responded.
Do search crawling errors negatively affect my site? Is this a situation where search engines recognize my site as new and I simply have to wait over time for my keyword ranking to improve? Is there anything else I can do to improve SEO and ultimately improve keyword ranking and visits? Thanks.
the crawling errors is a Metric that give you an idea about the anomalies on your websites which will help you to quickly fix them and don’t hurt your website Ranking (Just in some Rare Cases) Please Check this Article of Googlewebmastercentral : Link … According to the quick look of your website it’s PR3 with more than 600+ links indexed by google… so just continue your work as you did before and you will see the improvement ! don’t Panic Be Happy
Since your URLS changed, you would lose all your organic traffic except to your home page and any pages that still have the same name. All the existing rankings are linked to pages that don’t exist anymore and so are producing errors. It will take some time for Google to remove the old site pages and index and rank the new site. I would think it would happen pretty fast if your domain is PR 3. The fact that it hasn’t happened in 3 months makes me wonder if something else is wrong.
Thank you for your reply. Besides the number of non-existent pages from my old site, I don’t have any idea what could be wrong. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that Google Sites offers an option to redirect pages.
Is there a reason you did not redirect all of your old URL’s to the new website? This would have preserved all of your old traffic until the new site was healthy enough to rank on its own.
Hi Shawn. Thank you for your reply. Strangely enough, it doesn’t appear that Google Sites allows this as an option. I researched this on the Internet and it doesn’t appear that that Google Sites doesn’t have this capability.
Did you use Google Webmaster “Tools->Health->Fetch as Google” to see the what Google reports back?
I have just been changing some URL’s from numerics and lower case to proper case. Google are taking weeks to register the new URLs and I wish I had never started
Here is the results from an old url which has been redirected. The important thing to notice are:
Thank you so much for your reply. I use the fetch option every time I edit a page. Yesterday, I entered several old site pages to the url removal tool of Google Webmaster tools so that Google doesn’t index these pages any more. So far, this appears to be a success! If you are asking me to list some url’s that I asked Google not to index, I prefer not to as I don’t want to make these url’s public again. All these url’s lead to my new site with the text ‘This page does not exist’ on it.
Hi John. Thank you for this info. I wasn’t aware of any more improper urls to my site. All of the urls (pages that no longer exist from my old site) was manually inserted in the url removal tool of Google Webmaster Tools yesterday. I inserted all of the urls that Google Webmaster Tools identified as having crawling errors. Today, Google Webmaster Tools reports no crawling errors. Since then, I am noticing improvement in my site performance both in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. I am beginning to feel that there is a link between crawling errors and site performance. I guess time will tell.
Regarding sitemal.xml, I am not sure what this file is. Google Sites provides their own Sitemap and Robot.txt. Those that create a Google Sites simply needs to insert the proper Sitemap url in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.
I am under the imprssion that the Googl URL removal tool will keep Google happy but not other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo.
I am still in the process of trying to reduce the Google duplicated links and duplicated titles. The technique I use is to send the PHP http_response_code(301) and also set the META Canonical link to the preferred site. Vague memories from a Google Video the preferred method is to use the 301 redirection. The normal page is easy but I am finding the search and grouping tools a headache. I am gradually getting there although progress is slow due to the time it takes to make amendments and wait for Google to crawl the site again.
I checked your robots.txt file and the link to your sitemap.xml file is:
I am not sure how Google produces the sitemap.xml but hopefully it is comprehensive and worth checking. Should there be any omissions then maybe you could add the missing pages. This would also help other
Hi John. Bing Webmaster Tools also has a tool to remove urls. Apparently, Bing is related in some way to Yahoo. So, whatever changes you make to Bing Webmaster Tools might apply to Yahoo search as well. Please don’t quote me on this. I got this info through conducting a search.
