I’m between a rock in a hard place here and losing quite a bit of money. I just relaunched my web site: http://www.kgstiles.com. I was having some problems with loss of traffic. I realized that I did not have my 301 redirects set up properly. I fixed them and resubmitted my sitemap to Google. Google has since indexed most of it. I just found that the “link-juice” is not transferring properly(and therefore traffic has not come up), so I went into webmasters to find about 450, 404 errors. Upon investigation, I found that most of them were for pages that produced my desired 301 redirect in a browser. For example, http://kgstiles.com/pureplantessentials.html 301 redirects to http://kgstiles.com/pureplantessentials/ based on my .htacess file which states:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^moreinfo/(.*)$ http://www.kgstiles.com/moreinfo$1 [R=301]
RewriteRule ^healthsolutions/(.*)$ http://www.kgstiles.com/healthsolutions$1 [R=301]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ $1/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.htm$ $1/ [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
But this is listed as a 404 error page by Google’s indexing of my site. Am I configuring correctly? Could there be another underlying problem? I’m pretty desperate for answers here, so any help is greatly appreciated!
This article answers the question thoroughly and shows how to get around the problem:
http://www.deer-creek.ca/articles/search-engine-optimization/wordpress-pages-returning-404-page-not-found-headers