365 Hosting and Google bot Question

noreds

I use 365 as my hosting for my site irishiphone.com/
i have submitted a sitemap to google webmasters and resubmit whenever i update the site with more pages.
today in my webmasters page it gave me 42 "404 not found" errors
now the newest date on any is 20/4/08
on my 365 H-Sphere admin setup i have already placed redirects and "gone" to the pages that arent there anymore

my question is does googlebot recognise the redirects, etc from the H-Sphere setup.
Or do i need to setup some sort of 301 in the root folder also.
please say i dont need to set one up
how do i know that google will be told where to look for these pages

Sully

I dont think SEO and Redirects go down well at all. Why do you have 42 404? A site map is just all the links to different pages on your site..

noreds

i have the 404 errors because i changed the index and addresses on my site.
when i done this i did create redirects in h-sphere in the hope that this would tell google the pages have moved
and the pages that i deleted i create "gone" entries on h-sphere for them

what do you mean seo and redirects dont go down well at all.
do you mean this post should be in a different section, if so you can just say so.
i posted in this section because the problem is with googlebot and webmasters which crawl the site and of course have i think having no 404 errors and correct redirects is part of seo.

anyway if anyone else knows whether h-spehere is doing the job or i need 301 redirects please say so

cheers

Sully

Im slightly confused. You generated a sitemap, which is now outdated and Google has pages indexed that no longer exsist so you decided to create redirects to fix the problem?

My approach would have been to re-generate a sitemap and re-submit the sitemap to Google. It might take some time, but its the best approach imo.

Alternatively, you can use redirects. The suggest method to use is 301/302 Redirects depending on your situation.

See: http://www.theinternetdigest.net/archive/301-redirects-seo.html

noreds

I never said my sitemap was outdated
I resubmitted as soon as I changed the pages
you seen to think I just tried to do the redirects as a last minute thing
google webmaster has 404 errors for pages that were never in my sitemap
I always remove my test pages etc from the sitemap before submitting

The problem is my sitemap just tells google howmany urls my site has
not which pages have moved or gone etc

When I click the 404 links in webmaster it redirects me to the correct page or tells me the page is gone as I setup in h-spehere
I know google can be slow

All I want to know is am I doing everything correctly
will the 404 errors go because of my redirects
or do I also need to setup a 301 redirect
I talked to 365 n was told not to add a 301 n d guy thought the redirects should work with google
bit he wasn't sure

Sully

Im not an SEO Expert but I always assumed Google indexed pages according to your sitemap. Your telling Google what pages you have, not how many. If you had incorrect URLs in the sitemap, fair enough - resubmit it to fix it.

If Google is indexing wrong URLs regardless of the links in your sitemap and you want to address it with redirects, the above URL (in my earlier post) explains how to do that.

noreds

according to webmaster my sitemap has 9 URLs in it
and google has indexed 6 of them so far
but the URLs with the 404 errors are not ones that are in my sitemap
is there a way to add into the sitemap instructions of URLs moved or gone

if it is indexing more than my sitemap should i address this with google ?

Sully

Sitemaps are a list of all pages available for indexing by Google. Its a map of your site, showing all pages on your site, importance and update frequency.

I'm baffled as to why Google is indexing broken links for your site. Can you explain a bit more as to:
1) Did these links previously exist,
2) When did you remove these links,


Try using Xenu Link Sleuth to search your site and find any broken links. You might have broken links and be unaware of it. At least using this tool you can find out for sure if there are broken links.

noreds

im at a loss as to why this is happening and am worried this will affect my page rank. any advice greatly needed.

the link sleuth seems to be for windows
i only have mac computers
do you have any suggestions for a similar program on a mac

to explain about the links:
i originally had my site hosted on dot mac and had a domain redirect in place. i used iWeb to publish my site. when iWeb publishes a site it does not publish it to the root folder of the directory. instead it publishes the site into a folder (whatever you called the site in iWeb) inside the directory.
so for example my personal unlocking page used to be published to http://www.irishiphone.com/Main/Personal_Unlocking.html. Main was the name of the site in iWeb


now i moved to 365 hosting and use RapidWeaver to publish. this publishes to the root. so now my personal unlocking is at http://irishiphone.com/Personal_Unlocking.html
of course i dont want "Main" in my address anyway as it is not very descriptive for either user or google.

so the links with Main in them would have originally been active for a good while and submitted in a sitemap to google.
but i also have other links which were never in a sitemap. these pages i had named irishiphone.com/alt. i had use the alt folder for testing new layouts, publishing test pages, etc. the folder was only on my site for a week, 2 at most. i removed it about 2-3 weeks ago.
i never submitted any of the alt address to google. i have also tried to use webmasters remove url request for the alt directory and been denied

when i click any of the alt urls that are in webmasters i get
"The requested resource
/alt/page6/page6.html
is no longer available on this server and there is no forwarding address. Please remove all references to this resource."
i take it this is correct as i specified alt as gone in my h-sphere set up
when i click on any of the other urls i am redirected to the correct page that they have moved to.
same thing i set up a redirect in h-sphere.

as soon as i moved hosting and changed to rapidweaver i resubmitted my new sitemap to webmasters.
i resubmitted my sitemap last night to make sure there were no mistakes.
the last error was on 20/4/08 and it says my home page was last accessed 29/04/08

Sully

I used the program and have attached the report. You do have problems, which seems to be why Google has problems.

EDIT: The /alt/ folder is present. It has no content, but if you go to : http://irishiphone.com/alt you will see what I mean.

noreds

cheers Sully
have been looking through the list and of course im lost with most of it

few things:
i seen only 1 mention of alt, which webmasters have 4 errors with it
there was 1 error with Main, but it did say there was a redirect on it so dont know if that is an error ?
Main accounts for 31 of the 42 errors in my webmasters
a lot of the error in the list seemed to be to do with redirects. they also look like they are from the ads on my site

a large number of the errors also seem to be with the WC3 validation logo i have on the bottom of all my pages
any ideas on that one ?

anyway i think i need to sort the Main problem.
do you think that google is just taking its time updating the redirects ?

noreds

just a quick update
checked webmasters and now i have only 11 errors
so must be google being extremely slow at updating their records

thanks for the help so far guys
will report back in if they all disappear