Majority of inbound traffic goes to 404 page

Missing pages on my website after moving hosts.

[asmith]

I recently moved web hosts and re-designed my website. I am pretty sure I moved over all the pages from the old host but now almost 60% of my inbound traffic goes to my error page!

I can't find any missing pages on my site, I have run a link check analysis using the following and a few other scripts:

[validator.w3.org...]

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can find out which pages are missing? I have checked the error logs in my control panel that doesn't show any pages. <snip>

[edited by: physics at 8:01 pm (utc) on Nov. 23, 2005]
[edit reason] No specific URLs please. See TOS. [/edit]

[physics]

Hi asmith and welcome to WebmasterWorld.com!

Most likely what is happening is that you are getting traffic from search engines to those pages that no longer exist. To see all of the pages indexed for your site by Google or Yahoo type the following in the search box:
site:example.com
Where example.com is your domain name.
Also if you can look at your web stats and see what page is sending the referrals to the non-existant pages that might shed some light on it.
There are basically two things you can do.
1) Make an 'enhanced' 404 page that will help people find the pages they're looking for (like with a search box)
2) Redirect or refresh people to the proper pages from the old pages with either mod_rewrite or meta-refresh. The 'best' way is to do this with a 301 in .htaccess.

[encyclo]

A similar possibility is that the 404 errors are being caused by something like missing images or scripts. For example if you call a non-essential javascript file on every page you will get a glut of errors even though your site will appear to work.

You should check your error logs to find out the exact object or pages which are missing - you control panel on most shared hosting packages will offer access to the raw logs as well as the statistics package.