Google Webmaster listing all 302 Found as Soft 404: No longer indexing site

Asked Sep 05 '14 at 15:13

Active Sep 05 '14 at 15:13

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I have noticed a complete drop in organic search traffic for my sites. Looks like google has dropped us from indexing any of our pages – it started on 8/21 and has steadily declined to 0 impressions as of sept 4.

When I go into Google Webmaster tools it has all of the pages on my site now listed as a "Soft 404". If I run "view as googlebot" I will actually get the pages listed as 302 Found. It looks like wordpress makes the header 302 Found when you change the permalinks used.

In trying to figure out the problem I so far have:

Checked to make sure I have a robots.txt file and that it is accessible by google (this is what it is: User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/)

I am completely at a loss of what to do because we haven't changed anything on our sites recently to cause this.

asked Sep 05 '14 at 15:13

Mcestone

302 is a redirect code. If you changed your permalinks then your old URLs to those are probably returning that code. – ElGavilan Sep 05 '14 at 15:15
Thanks, I understand that. I just want to know why google is listing all of them as soft 404s and stopped indexing us. Also, why it starting happening so suddenly when we haven't make any changes recently. – Mcestone Sep 05 '14 at 15:21
Have you tried submitting a new site map and reindexing? – ElGavilan Sep 05 '14 at 15:28
Great idea, I just did. I will let you know if this works. – Mcestone Sep 05 '14 at 15:33
Unfortunately all of my pages are still being listed as soft 404's – Mcestone Sep 08 '14 at 13:17

Google Webmaster listing all 302 Found as Soft 404: No longer indexing site

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