Removed a few tags, and now Googlebot thinks I have broken links

  • writingferret

    (@writingferret)


    14 years, 5 months ago

    I know this is sort of a Google question and a WordPress question, but since WordPress people would have more experience with this, I figured I would ask.

    Okay, so I removed some tags. This tells my sitemap, and therefore Googlebot that something changed — pages are now gone. Since I have the tag cloud in my sidebar, however, Google now thinks that I have a broken link on every page because, obviously, those pages never got changed. Is there a way to manually change the date of last change for all my pages or something, so that Googlebot will crawl it as new? I’m about to go change something minor on each of the affected pages but, geez, that’s a huge PITA for just removing tags…

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • alism

    (@alism)

    14 years, 5 months ago

    So long as you’ve not currently got any links on your site that lead to a 404, then I’d probably leave Googlebot to crawl by itself until your entire site has been re-spidered (a month or so probably, depending on the site size and pagerank).

    I would be looking to 301 redirect any 404’s though. It’d be a shame to lose any incoming external links for example. This plugin looks like it might be of use to you (not used it myself, so ymmv):
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

    Thread Starter writingferret

    (@writingferret)

    14 years, 5 months ago

    Wouldn’t that seriously affect my search rankings, though?

    alism

    (@alism)

    14 years, 5 months ago

    How so?

    Thread Starter writingferret

    (@writingferret)

    14 years, 5 months ago

    I thought the Goog penalized any site that had 404s of any kind…

    alism

    (@alism)

    14 years, 5 months ago

    You wouldn’t get a penalty for having a broken link on pages that they’ve crawled and indexed previously. Like I say, so long as you’ve fixed the link ready for next time Googlebot swings by, you should be fine (I don’t actually think you’d get a “penalty” there anyway, unless you had lots and lots of broken links on each page)

    Besides, if you 301 it, it’s no longer a 404 anyway…

    Thread Starter writingferret

    (@writingferret)

    14 years, 5 months ago

    Okay then. I took a slightly more paranoid approach and just re-created the tags, but didn’t attach anything to them. That way there is a page there for Googlebot to see, if needed.

    Thanks for your help alism. 🙂

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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