My 7-year old website that was doing fairly well, over the last 2 months has dropped in traffic by about half. In the process of trying to figure out what’s going completely wrong, I noticed that I’m getting a fair amount of 404 errors consistently.
I’m getting about 25 showing up in my Google Search console as /location/[city]. I mark them as “fixed” and they keep showing back up the next day or so.
location/miami/
location/morrisville/
location/north-fort-myers/
location/burbank/
I’m not even really sure why these links would show up to begin with, since my only CPT is called “services”, and when someone goes to a listing, the link has /services/ before the country and city are listed. Not “location.” Or am I missing something here.
But more concerning, is that in my redirection plugin, in the 404 Error tab, I am getting page after page (daily) of 404 pages for not only these same 25 /location/ 404 errors (like above), but I am also getting all kinds of similiar ones but with /services before it. Such as:
/services/burlingame/
/services/orlando/
/services/minneapolis/
And sometimes they are like this:
/location/oceanside/directory/
I have 6k+ 404 pages in this directory logged in the last 2 months. And some of them are legitimate ones from old posts/pages etc that I need to deal with for other reasons. But a LOT of them are 404’s like the examples above.
Are these from ‘bots’ trying to access my search? Or am I really getting this many mistypes by humans causing these?
Or is something possibly wrong with my breadcrumbs and people are clicking on the “city” part of the breadcrumb and there’s an error generating the link? Is that possible?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Curtis B.
https://www.scanyourentirelife.com/directory
Guust 7 years, 6 months ago.