deadsea - 4:24 pm on Oct 23, 2012 (gmt 0)

I suspect that you have so many of these 404s on your site that Googlebot is spending ALL of its time crawling them and not spending any time crawling your content. If I am right, the number of documents indexed (WMT -> Health -> Index Status) would have fallen.

I would suggest putting in rules to redirect any of these 404s as best you can to appropriate content (not to your home page). If you redirect these 404 urls then *perhaps* googlebot will figure the situation out faster.

Is this your specific problem? Googlebot appears to be treating some numbers in javascript as relative urls and appending them to the end of the current page and you get urls like http://www.example.com/this-is-the-article-name/1345510526000 Where the number at the end shouldn't be there. (I just read some other articles about this problem with Googlebot and Disqus). If so, you could probably put in an htaccess rule using redirect match, or mod rewrite to solve the problem. Something like these:

RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)[0-9]+$ http://example.com/$1

RewriteRule ^(.*)[0-9]+$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]