Google indexing irrelevant URLs as 404's

RapidWeaver Classic General
1

Not a rapidweaver issue but any help appreciated. I have recently rebuilt a site http://thewillowscanterbury.co.uk. Did 301 redirects from old site URLs, set non www version as preferred, submitted sitemap, verified with google webmaster and published no problems.

A week or so later the site has disappeared from Google index and is showing 10 crawl errors. The weird thing however is that the URLs showing as crawl errors have nothing to do with the site - they are local business directory type URLs. It’s almost as if I had accidentally submitted the sitemap of somewhere else - which I haven’t.

2

Think I have solved the problem. The theme I am using (Nick Cates ‘Forward’) seems to have a javascript clash with Trip Advisor widgets, hence I tried adding an iFrame to the Trip Advisor page. Whilst this worked quite nicely, google picked up 10 404’s from trip adviser as links from my site. Not only did this throw up the crawl errors but resulted in the site being de-indexed. I have removed the iframe and marked the 404’s as resolved in Google Search Console. Almost immediately, the site index has appeared again :sweat_smile: Sop the moral is, beware of iFrames and if you have to have one use a Rel=“nofollow”