What do these webmaster tools errors mean?

[niners52]

A little over a month ago the company I worked at launched a new site. The site was down for a weekend and ever since I have been getting a ton of errors.
1. Over 500 access denied errors. We have our robots.txt setup properly, so what are these from?
2. I am showing 125,000 not found errors and it keeps increasing. The site has less than 20000 pages so where are these other things from?
3. Over 20 400 response code errors. The only pattern I have noticed with these are they all have a % in the title.
4. Under Index Status the total amount has dropped about 20% since the site launched.
5. My sitemap submission had maxed out at about 50% indexed and has been dropping since. My guess is that since some of the new stuff has redirects from older sites and it is showing up as duplicate content.

[niners52]

What other information do you want? This filter thing is new to me, I know the pages were made in .net. What exactly should I ask the guy who made them?

[zico82]

For the access denied and not found errors Google WMT tells you exactly where the problem is. Click on Health > Crawl Errors and then select 'not found', 'access denied' and then click on your links underneath to find where the errors are coming from and then fix them.

[niners52]

It shows the url that has the problem and they are urls to the old site. I don't want Google to see 99% of this stuff anymore, and the old site has been pulled down. So is it hurting me and is there a way to get rid of them or tell Google that those pages are gone and don't matter anymore?

[Kevin H]

Although not directly related the post below just happens to say (as part of their different problem) what they did to get the old site out of the index.

http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/can-you-help-with-this-mystery-old-site-s-links-463823.html

[niners52]

One of the things mentioned in that post is the Google remove url tool. Should I do that? With now over 130k it might take awhile, any tool to bulk export and import? And is it worth it?

[eeyipes]

One of the things mentioned in that post is the Google remove url tool. Should I do that? With now over 130k it might take awhile, any tool to bulk export and import? And is it worth it?

My experience with the url removal tool is that it removes pages from search results, but not from the WMT number of indexed pages. I still get 404's off pages I requested removed as G still tries to crawl them. It's taking a long time for them to get deindexed.

[niners52]

My experience with the url removal tool is that it removes pages from search results, but not from the WMT number of indexed pages. I still get 404's off pages I requested removed as G still tries to crawl them. It's taking a long time for them to get deindexed.

In your opinion is it worth going through and doing it?

[eeyipes]

In your opinion is it worth going through and doing it?

I haven't seen any major positive results from it yet, so I can't say. I still have about 40k pages to lose.

[niners52]

I haven't seen any major positive results from it yet, so I can't say. I still have about 40k pages to lose.

How many did you do?

[Highland]

It shows the url that has the problem and they are urls to the old site. I don't want Google to see 99% of this stuff anymore, and the old site has been pulled down. So is it hurting me and is there a way to get rid of them or tell Google that those pages are gone and don't matter anymore?

So just to be clear

1. You took your old site down and put a new one up
2. You changed URL structures and the old pages now return 404
3. Your rankings are falling like a rock

So if the above is right, I would put some 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones. What you've basically done is throw any of your old rankings away and start over from scratch. A 301 would at least tell Google where the new pages are and save whatever rank you've got left.

[eeyipes]

How many did you do?

Yesterday was week 6, and 16k pages have dropped off according to the index count in WMT. My high was 62k, I'd like to get it down to maybe 5k. The decrease probably has more to do with 301 redirects and noindex tags I placed than the use of the url removal tool - that's my guess anyway.

[niners52]

So just to be clear

1. You took your old site down and put a new one up
2. You changed URL structures and the old pages now return 404
3. Your rankings are falling like a rock

So if the above is right, I would put some 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones. What you've basically done is throw any of your old rankings away and start over from scratch. A 301 would at least tell Google where the new pages are and save whatever rank you've got left.

I got in my 301 redirects. My impressions are about half of what they were, but traffic is only down about 15% or so. Any other ideas or suggestions? All of my on page stuff is good, I have this webmaster tools errors and very few links.

[Roger Dave]

Hello niners52,

I have gone through your post and as you have mentioned in it that your website is down for weekend, so that is the reason why Google Webmaster Tool shows you these much errors but no need to worry about it as your site currently live and working fine, so when google bots will crawl again your site then all your errors will get fixed

You can use the tool from google webmaster tool which is "Fetch as Google" to crawl your website faster.