f*cked up our SEO by mistake - Any tips?

[limitless_c]

Hey guys, I need a bit of help with SEO.

So, we had a site with more than 1.000 pages indexed, this pages used a url structure like /state/city/something/name

One of our engineers changed a part of the url structure, something like /city/ to /city-1/, he also updated the sitemap with the new url's.

He didn't put any 301 redirection so now all the old url's started throwing 404 to google, we didn't knew about this and the engineer didn't told us because he didn't even knew the mistake he had made.

Short story, google de indexed all of the pages and is not taking in account the new url's in the sitemap.

We now have less than 75 pages indexed and it has been like this for 3 weeks, I think google dont trust us anymore?

I really dont know what to do, google stopped visiting the old url's so there is no point in putting the 301 redirects now.

Thanks for your time..

 

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[biophase]

Hey guys, I need a bit of help with SEO.

So, we had a site with more than 1.000 pages indexed, this pages used a url structure like /state/city/something/name

One of our engineers changed a part of the url structure, something like /city/ to /city-1/, he also updated the sitemap with the new url's.

He didn't put any 301 redirection so now all the old url's started throwing 404 to google, we didn't knew about this and the engineer didn't told us because he didn't even knew the mistake he had made.

Short story, google de indexed all of the pages and is not taking in account the new url's in the sitemap.

We now have less than 75 pages indexed and it has been like this for 3 weeks, I think google dont trust us anymore?

I really dont know what to do, google stopped visiting the old url's so there is no point in putting the 301 redirects now.

Thanks for your time..

I think you can move the URL structure back and it could go back to normal.

I did this once and was wondering why I couldn't find my site in search. I fixed it and it came back. My URL mistake was there for over 3 months!

 

[eliquid]

change it back to original, or put on the redirects

you will be fine

 

[Tiger TT]

1. Change the URL structure back to original.
2. Send your sitemap to Google in Google Search Console.
3. Also do a sitewide crawl in google search console to speed up the process.

Don't do any 301 redirects. Don't make any important changes for a while.

 

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[silentjay]

Don't worry people change their url formats all the time, google aren't going to black list you for it. I made this mistake myself recently. Do what @Tiger TT suggests, although personally I'd implement 301 redirects as you don't know where else might be linking to those pages.